Labor Dream

I dropped my husband off at the train station. "Where are you going?" I asked. "To pick potatoes." Yes, this was my morning dream on Labor Day. I knew I had to let him go, the love thing. I knew he was going west. (So, probably Idaho, right?) And I know this relates to the play I'm directing, where a husband offers a ride to the station to the wife who is leaving...

Everything relates to the play I'm directing. That's how these intense preoccupations go. Everything I'm reading connects in cool ways, even the things I did not read for research. I found out in A Curable Romantic, by Joseph Skibell, that Anton Chekhov's doctor in Yalta (just read a biography of Chekhov), was an Esperantist! Who knew?

There's a bakery in the play. A wonderful place with magically delicious bread. Get this, also from A Curable Romantic:

Here, exactly as I had been taught as a child, was the Heavenly Bakery, where angelic bakers were busy preparing the manna that will be enjoyed by the righteous at the end of time. Their magnificent ovens were working at full blast. Apprentices in smocks and caps were running with floury wheelbarrows. Master bakers were shouting their orders, opening their oven doors, inspecting their loaves, while their assistants slathered the long work tables with oil and pounded down mountains of dough with giant rolling pins. The scent of coffee filled the air. The music I'd heard below, produced by the circuit of the planets, now blared out of the radios each baker listened to at his station.

Our bakery, while heavenly, is not quite this big, but the cast will appreciate the personal music at the baker's station! And I tracked it down (an Internet wormhole), that the heavenly bakery is a real story from Jewish classical texts. May all your Labor Day picnics have plenty of manna. I hope ours has potato salad. And the potato heart comes from Oregon! And, just as the work goes on in the Heavenly Bakery, we do have rehearsal tonight!