sometime in 1994 . . .
the Batman show
My family was sitting in church. The chapel looked odd, partly because the pulpit was to the left rather than centered. Someone had just stepped down from the stand, and a man with black curly hair, a moustache, and a beard got up to speak. He wore what looked like a metallic lavender necktie as a headband. His words were incoherent, mostly stuttering and nervous laughter. When he stepped down, a few scattered people clapped. Over the next minute or so, a few others hesitantly joined in the applause. I looked at the bishop, who was in the congregation, and after a minute he begin to clap as well. I hadn't joined in before since it was quite unusual to clap during a church meeting, but now I did as well. Soon everyone was clapping and many people were whistling and yelling.
The room suddenly went dark and the applause subsided. On the stand, smoke rose from the floor. A figure wearing a huge cape descended slowly and diagonally from the ceiling. He was in a superhero pose. Colored spotlights trained on the caped figure and a very deep voice began making some sort of announcement. The cape fell to the floor, revealing that there had actually been two people behind it. When they reached the floor, they began a sort of dance in slow motion. The lights suddenly turned back on and the smoke was gone. I could now see that the dancers were men wearing Batman costumes. One costume was black and the other white. Their dance involved acrobatics, such as a back-to-back somersault.
Later, after the show, I was standing backstage with a janitor. Rather than the chapel, it was now a normal full-sized stage at one end of a high-school gym. The janitor was explaining to me how they got the rights to use copyrighted Batman items in the show. On the backstage walls were painted different trademarks and logos. I noticed that one was "Metallica." The janitor explained that if the people on stage crossed the names, they wouldn't be sued. I imagined a motorcycle riding up the wall over the word
Metallica.
Just then, a gym instructor walked up to the stage from the gym floor. Hands on his hips, he glared at us. From across the room, I heard obnoxious laughter. Someone had pushed a wheeled cart toward the gym instructor.
Later, I was outside in a grassy area surrounded by large trees. An enormous playground was nearby, where I saw a spinning wall on some sort of underground turntable. The wall was about 5 feet high and 4 feet wide. Standing on the turntable on one side of the wall was a short old woman with a small dog. On the other side of the wall was a large lizard. As they rotated, I felt that I needed to shove a cart toward the old woman and hit her with it. She looked harmless, but was some sort of evil witch.
A girl was standing beside me. She had a ticket to the movie "Mrs. Doubtfire" in one hand and something very valuable in the other hand. I told her I needed her ticket for something, but she said she needed it for her little brother's operation. I promised to buy her a new one if I destroyed it, so she handed it to me and then kissed me. She told me to be sure not to hurt the dog next to the old woman, and I assured her that I wouldn't. My plan was now to push a large flat cart (the type at warehouse stores) at the lizard.
The scene changed, and I was walked into a small white room. I noticed that the walls were textured. There appeared to be no ceiling, as I could see the cloudy blue sky, but I reached up my hands and realized that they sky was actually painted on the ceiling. [r]'s voice laughed and said something. Someone was in the room with me. I then knew that [r] had some sort of magic power and that I did, too. I would be trapped, as would another person in the room with me, unless I could get us out. I tried using willpower to dissolve the walls and ceiling, but it didn't seem to work. I merely raised the temperature in the room slightly.
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