Dreaming with Stanley Tucci

I’m always mystified by words or songs that stand out in a dream. I woke up to a pronounced dream image of my husband running up to me in a crowded restaurant to ask, “So, do you want the mezzaluna?” “Mezzaluna” was accentuated. Playing it over in my mind, I imagined an orgasmically delicious half-moon pasta stuffed with Buffalo mozzarella in cream sauce. I scanned my memory to see if we’ve ever eaten somewhere with that dish. I asked my hubs, and he associated it with the restaurant where Ron Goldman worked, trivia he remembered from the OJ trial. (He has a freaky good memory and that’s not where I’d wanted this delicious image to land.) After going down a rabbit hole of the word’s meaning (“half-moon” in Italian, and also the name of a certain knife used especially for chopping herbs or cutting pizza), I stumbled back to Stanley Tucci’s #SearchingforItaly to take in the succulent pasta images. The music in his show transported me to Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” and visceral memories of the million times I played that song in jazz band long ago. I remembered a photograph that my old boyfriend sent to me a while back from that time together, so I sent him a quick text and he responded, “Can I call you?” “Always,” I replied. Our chat reconnected us to our respective creative projects of late with a familiarity and comfort only friends of nearly 40 years intimately know. All this wonderfulness stemmed from a dream image inquiring if I wanted the “mezzaluna.” The answer is, “Yes, I most certainly do.”