The celebrity dream saga continues,
in which I reveal a numerical code of fine dining:

Deby has this friend who is a good cook so we decide to convert The Healing Arts Center into a restaurant. I’m upstairs in our large bodywork classroom and it has been set with tables. I’m sitting at one of the tables and I make a mental seating chart of the room so that the cook will be able to tell by the numbers, what table and what person each order is for. This is a semi-arbitrary code essential for all fine dining, the number of the tables is generally logical to whoever set them up initially, but then those numbers become fixed to a particular table and over the years, as the tables move around the restaurant in different configurations, the original logic is lost to seemingly illogical & arbitrary habit.

The order of the patrons at the table is generally numbered from one up, starting at the person closest to the door (the primary entrance) and then moving clockwise around the table. I randomly choose the table I am at as table one and move outward in a circle from there. All the tables are circular. People begin to arrive, at first in couples and then in foursomes. I decide that as I once was a fabulous waiter, ten years in food service from dishwasher to headwaiter/host, I will be a waiter. I have no order book so I take my first order for a couple on the back of a receipt that I pull from my pocket & then I go to the clinic for the receipt books that we keep there.

There is a young Russian man helping me. I took German with him in college. We worked together as we were the only students in the class over twenty-one years of age. I remember him telling me one day when we were studying, “You Americans with your diets. It’s all a scam. Russian doctors have known forever that all you need to do is drink a lot of water and walk a lot, there’s no great secret way to circumvent this simple process.” The Russian “common sense” diet, I think he wanted to be a doctor.

People were then arriving and getting seated, with Deby as the hostess, slightly faster then I can keep up with. A ten top, a group of ten people, arrives and I am going to take the table when we hear them begin to talk in Russian. They discover my cohort is Russian and we toast them, “Stra-vey!” I decide to take a break. I am clearly being outworked effortlessly by this younger man (ah birthday dreams). I head down to the kitchen and discover that the head chef is Mikhail Baryshnikov. The kitchen itself is gorgeous with a vast array of gas burners and overhead hooks for cookware. Mikhail’s hair is messed up and he looks exhausted. I tell him that he’ll get a warm reception from the Russian ten top and he asks me to take a hamburger plate to the dishwasher’s daughter in the next room. I am making a mental note of our policies, “Free meal with every shift, to be eaten after the rush.”

The dishwasher is a medieval surf sitting in what looks like a blacksmith’s shop. His young daughter has a German peasant girl outfit on, including a cloth hat that covers her ears “Thank you sir, very much,” she says while backing timidly away and bowing. I decide to take water upstairs. Mikhail comes out of the kitchen with a pitcher of water. I sit down on the stairs and he sits on the floor. We are sitting in front of a sliding patio door, the kind with the track that many people put wood doweling in to prevent people from breaking in. It’s winter outside. He pours the water into to the track and we’re both watching the ice cubes floating, we’re wondering if the water in the track will get cold enough to freeze. We communicate this through facial expressions. Another young woman comes up to the patio door from the outside. She reminds me of the girl from the black and white version of miracle on 34th street. She knocks on the glass and asks how we’ve gotten our sunflowers to bloom in the middle of winter. I look to my left and see large sunflowers in a display. Mikhail says, “They’re ceramic.” I wake up.

This is clearly a dream about the passage of time. Flowering in winter is artifice.