Plastic People

"Oh, I wanna be a plastic person!" I exclaimed.

I won't tell you what all led up to this part of my dream. Suffice it to say, it was a travel dream. I had gotten together with one of my students and we had made a flying trip somewhere north and back again. Since we had one extra day, we decided to drive down to Socorro for a seminar that would pay her (she was trying to make extra money or get a better job.) The trips for me were both fun and instructive.

Somehow we met up with some of her friends who wanted to go to Socorro, too. We were taking my car, but she was driving. My friend was wearing an earthy hippy-ish top with little red tassels. Then her friends were a beautiful black girl and a guy (I think he was white). Not knowing their names, we're just going to have to go with those distinguishing phrases when I refer to them.

We were looking for the nearest Loewe's for something before we got out of town, and we were in a part of town I didn't know. (None of us knew.) It was on the southern edge of the city. We were driving on what seemed like the "Loop" around Lubbock, TX, and from that high way I saw a new theme park (which I had seen before -- in my dreams?) Anyway, it was early in the morning and huge "plastic" people were walking out to their stations.

The biggest feature of this theme park was a huge loop-de-loop of "slide" -- except it wasn't to slide on. Instead, the slide was more level and these plastic people arranged themselves in settings. There were two kinds of plastic people -- those that were all white -- covered with a coating of white so that every part of them is white (kinda like the Blue Man Group being plasticized in blue) -- and those that are in regular color but their clothes have the sheen of being plastic like they are huge toys. The white ones get into statuesque-in-the-park positions.

So anyway, these people are walking all around us -- knights, kings, queens, kids blowing bubbles, etc. to get to their positions. One all-white guy practically climbs over the hood of my little car. I blurt out, "Oh, I wanna be a plastic person!" but knew that was ridiculous. We drive a bit more and realize that we are actually on a plastic slide and now we need to decide where to go (turn left, turn right? how to get out of here? either direction had people we could mow down) because we are facing a woman who needs to be where we are. That's when we realize that somehow we had driven onto the feature. At the same instant, the people in charge of the display realized they had a car out there.

A (not-plastic) man with a clipboard ran out to us and made us get out of the car. Then they decided, since there wasn't time to get the car down, they'd use the car as part of their display. It was small; it would work.

"What are they going to do with us?" we whispered to each other. We were in an internal hallway, waiting for our "punishment." As we wait, I look out the huge south-facing windows and in the sky, I see a replica of my friend's blouse being made in plastic. It's just like the blouse appeared bit by bit and a huge hand squeezed it out.

A woman came breezing up and said, "I'm so sorry. This all was my fault. I was late." I gathered from that that we had come upon the feature just as the gates were open and we had taken her place and the gate didn't know any different, so it allowed us in. "I'll be in the next batch," she said and settled down to wait with us.

My friends were wondering what the plastic people did and I told them it was like manikin modeling, where you dress up in clothes a store wants to sell and stand in the window like a manikin, unblinking. These people get into poses and hold them while the crowd surges around them.

"I did manikin modeling, once," I bragged. "It's funny. The people walking by often don't even know you're real. The kids usually realize it and try to make you blink."

"Yeah, no blinking."

"I managed for five minutes."

"This is for fifty minutes."

Oh, my goodness! Not to move for fifty minutes? Not even blink? I didn't know it was even possible. Surely, they'd blink surreptitiously.

Thinking of the plastic blouse version of the blouse my friend was wearing, I said, "I think they're going to use us."

"Be an exaggerated version of yourself," we were told. "Aging and worried? Let the wrinkles show. . . ." I took that last to mean me.

I bet we'd get paid a lot, which was good for my friend and her friends. (They had all been needed some kind of job to help with the finances.)

Sure enough, my friend was escorted one direction and the remaining three of us followed the late woman to the "showers" where we stood and turned to be sprayed with a plastic covering. It made my joints harder to move so I walked Frankenstein-like. I briefly saw my friend in her plastic clothes. Her cheeks were painted red and the way they put up her hair, she looked like a doll, a huge life-sized doll.

I was trying to figure out what my pose would be when I looked up and saw, flying through the sky, as if he had been launched from the theme park, a huge fat baby with a blanket. I could see where the baby ended up (he didn't "land" -- he still hovered facing the theme park, cross-legged in the sky above some buildings) and he took out a cigarette and started smoking it. He looked pissed. I thought he must have lost his job and we replaced him.

They gave us a meal, but I was too nervous to be hungry. Besides, I worried that sitting down to eat would wipe some of that plastic off my backside, and how would that look? They assured me the plastic was dry now, but I still didn't eat.

When I woke up, I was still worrying about whether I could stay still and unblinking for fifty minutes, what my pose would be, and what the man pretending to be a baby would do.

The part about the manikin modeling that I did was really true. I did a five-minute stint at a little boutique in a mall. At that time I wore hard contact lenses and in the five minutes, they dried out. I had to be very careful closing my eyes for my first blink so they wouldn't pop out. Now, since I've had lasik surgery, I think it would be a bit easier. But it was a challenge and lots of fun to see the kids point out to their parents that we were "real" and the parents look more closely and jump when they realized it was true.