A Chinese Theater

How did I become the only grownup in the world?

I dreamt that my parents had taken me back to college. This was unlike a typical returning to school dream in which one is somehow ill prepared, lost, late, or hopelessly behind in study. I looked around at the other students and realized that they were all novices while I was advanced and couldn’t fit in their society. I passed through a tunnel that led to the other side of the street, off-campus. I then entered a business known in this dream to be the Chinese Theater. It resembled a movie theater except that it was well lit. Nothing was dark. The walls, seating, and every feature of the room were bright and pristine.

I woke up, and was considering this dream as I drifted back to sleep.

Upon returning to the dream, I found myself in the theater kitchen that supplies the theater’s concession stand. A table was filled with different shapes of cut cookies all loosely fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. A right hand with a paint brush slung brightly colored icings onto the whole field of cookies with swift wide strokes.

Admiring the beautiful scene that had been painted on this table full of cookies I began to think of what will happen to the painting after the cookies are separated and served. Would the icing that had spanned the spaces between cookies fall away and be lost, or could it remain attached to the cookies and not be wasted? Will anyone ever be able to appreciate the scene that had been painted? Then I noticed that miraculously, somehow each individual cookie bore its own intricate beautiful scene.

Life is an open-book test. We are encouraged to study together. I have noticed however, that competing cheat-sheets are circulating among the students. Both cheat-sheets include apparently correct answers that appeal to differing segments of the student body’s prejudices and play upon their fears. When these cheat-sheets are used the whole class fails.

Did you know that they have elections in North Korea? The ballots feature one candidate, a candidate who has been chosen by the party. The ballot box is monitored by a party official. It is supplied with a red pen so that voters can strike through the candidate’s name. If a majority of voters use the red pen to reject the party’s candidate a new candidate is chosen and another election is held. I am told that similar elections in Communist China occasionally overrule the party’s first choice.

When we hold elections, it seems that we fear that the forceful hand of government, (a government that assumes to have the authority to touch everything that is important to us), may pretend to represent our foolish neighbors for a term. This fear is so compelling that few of us even consider using the red pen.

A Chinese Theater © 2024 by Mark Gresham is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0A Chinese Theater © 2024 by Mark Gresham is licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International