Last Night, I Had A Weird Dream....

Last Night, I had a weird dream... no, I didn’t visit a WILD STRAWBERRY patch nor an outhouse I used as a child... and I don’t think you need a dream analysis too to figure this one out. Last night, I dreamed I was in a Hollywood movie... sort of.

I was working on a script, and wrote a scene where I did my usual Hitchcock cameo - you can see me in NIGHT HUNTER and CYBERZONE and a bunch of my other movies - though sometimes you have to use the pause button. I wrote in this scene where I was walking a dog in the background of a shot - my childhood dog Waggles who is long gone. And when we come to shoot that scene the Director loves Waggles but comes up with this great idea on the set... instead of walking the dog, Waggles is off the leash and being chased by his owner - this really hot chick in a miniskirt. And then, throughout the movie, the hot chick chases Waggles! And by the end, there are scenes with the hot chick and Waggles and the lead characters. The hero gravs the running Waggles and gives him back to the hot chick in the miniskirt and they fall in love... while petting Waggles.

And I no longer have a cameo in the film.

So I write this on the set while everyone is waiting... and wanting me to hurry up...

They film it.

Everyone loves Waggles... and Waggles even gets scenes without the hot chick...

Waggles is on the poster! My name is in fine print at the bottom.

Waggles gets invite do the premiere in Westwood, and I do not.

Now, I can kind of understand why they’d want him on the red carpet. My long dead childhood dog was the cutest dig that ever lived - we named him Waggles because it wasn’t just his tail that wagged when he was excited - it was his whole body. It would start at the tail, then travel forward until he was completely wagging - even his head. Waggles was a small dog - a terrier mix - but he could jump the six foot fence in our back yard. At least once a month he’s jump the fence - a miracle or sheer determination - and find some girlfriend dog in the neighborhood, then come back to the front door of the house and scratch at it until someone let him in.

But about once a year, Waggles would jump the fence and be gone for days. We’d all be worried that he may have been hit by a car or something while on his adventure... but then he’d show up at the front door, tired and ready to get back to work with his job of being petted and fed and played with by my brother and sister and myself. Somewhere out there were probably some little Waggles and some pissed off female dog owners. Every time there were local kids with a box of free puppies in front of the grocery store, I’d check them out to see if they looked like Waggles... sometimes they did.

On time Waggles jumped the fence and didn’t come back... and weeks past. The first couple of days, we’d check the front porch to see if he was out there too tired to scratch oin the door... but he wasn’t there. After a couple of weeks, we began to suspect the worst - he’d been hit by a car and was dead on the side of some road. And, as the eldest kid, whenever I rode my bike on some road I’d look in the ditches for Waggles - so that I could take him home and we could give him a funeral... but I never found him. Other dogs, cats, and other animals - yeah. But no cute waggly terrier mix.

Over a month later there was a scratching at the front door - Waggles, in a strange collar. A really expensive collar. For a while, Waggles had been someone else’s pet... but he came back to us. My guess is that they fed him canned dog food - we fed him cheap dry dog food - and probably petted him and played with him more than we did, because we kind of took him for granted at that point. But after a month and a half of being pampered, he was homesick. We were his family. So he decided to end his long adventure and hop some other fence and come back to the people he loved. And for a while we petted and played with him constantly. We were happy to have him back. And his return became a family holiday - every year we would celebrate Waggles Return From His Long Goneness. On the big board of Scripts To Write, one is about Waggles adventures when he jumped the fence and lived with rich people... was he heir to some millionaire’s fortune?

In my dream, Waggles becomes a movie star and signs a three picture deal with Disney. And I am sitting at home watching Entertainment Tonight interview him. And Salma Hayak play with him and pet him on the big screen. And TMZ shows Waggles and Paris Hilton coming of out a trendy nightclub. And I watch the big dog star rise to the top and steal roles away from Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt like everyone else... on television. This is the life of a screenwriter....

It was a weird dream, because I was both proud and jealous of Waggles... I didn’t even get my cameo in the movie I wrote. Pisser.

In real life, I had long moved out of my parent’s house and Waggles was an old man when he hopped the fence one last time. I don’t know what kind of adventure he had, but it was his last. He never came back. I suspect he just didn’t want to die in the back yard, and found some porch to crawl under or dark quiet place to spend his final hours. But Waggles lives on in my memory... and in my imagination he’s always sipping Perrier in his dog bowl and having a private chef whip him up meals in some mansion up the hill... and I guess he lives on in my dreams as a movie star.

- Bill

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