Women At Odds

The man whose birthday it was left the table to sit with other friends. As he sat down across the room, this was outside in the back of a trendy new restaurant down from the old Victoria Theater on 16th Street, three women leaned across the table toward each other. One was the wife of the birthday man. She's always the watcher and has a painter's eye for detail.

"I've had strange dreams lately too," one of the other women said, a woman of 40 something, in her prime but unable to hide her feeling of vulnerability. She wore a shawl and had this habit of dragging it across her mouth. She recounted how in the dream she and her husband had been flying along, high above the earth, then suddenly they began falling. They tried everything to slow the fall but couldn't. Suddenly, they found themselves thrown down on the earth. "We got up and looked at each other," she said with a tipsy slur. "It was very eerie. I didn't know if I was dead or alive and he didn't either and we just stood there looking at each other not knowing if were dead or alive."

The third woman, a well known cabaret singer and stage actress, had a dream to share. "This was terrifying," she began and she kept shaking her head. "I mean this was really terrifying. I was in a forest, at night. Everything was fine. I was walking along, I don't know where I was going, but then suddenly something dragged me down into the earth. Oh my God. Just grabbed and took me down." She stopped to drain her glass. "I was really screaming, wasn't I?" She turned to her husband. He nodded. "And I can scream. I mean I practice screaming, right?" She said everyone in the house could hear her, including her son whom she had to comfort because he was totally weirded out.

The teller said that some days later she went to a psychic who'd been recommended and he calmed her down. But she has come away from the dream with the idea that she may have been the murder victim in someone else's dream.

She went on to explain, but I fell away, into the conversation behind me, at the next table, where they were talking about the mother of a first grader at one of the city's prominent private schools who had killed herself a few days earlier. There were few details. One person said there had been rumors of a bad relationship with her husband and that something horribly dramatic had happened and she threw herself off the Golden Gate bridge....

I didn't read anything about it but of course this time of year they try to keep these things quiet.

Then a few days later this appeared on youtube...