fox | dream theater

man, it gets weirder and weirder. i was in the sistine chapel, watching the papal elections. i got there in time to sing the "gloria", which i didn't know -- but fortunately there was someone from my chapel choir there, and i could hear her well enough to sort of imitate what she was doing. i was lucky she was there for the soprano line, because there was an alto from my chapel choir as well, whom i could hear almost as clearly. (in fact, the "soprano" was a classmate from my last semester at UVa, and the alto was -- i don't even know who, but she got the old classmate's name.) when we were done singing, we all took our seats, and the cardinals kind of clustered together and explained that they were going to speak in italian rather than in english, and that was our tough luck; but somehow when they started speaking i could understand them anyway. (dream babel fish? you tell me.) they kind of got up and gave dumb little speeches, like at a student council election, and the ones who were running sat at this one table when they were done speaking. we cheered as each of them came up to speak. and at one point a TV crew or something came in, but they had, like, hazmat suits on, and the other singer~audience types and i were scared -- but they did turn out to be just a TV crew, with, like, a board with all the candidates' names so they could keep track of how many votes each one had gotten on a bar graph. and i pulled out a notebook and started taking notes about the whole thing, so i'd be able to write about it later (such as the fact that it was a good thing the other singers knew the "gloria" we were doing, because my default i'm afraid is PDQ Bach's "Gloria, gloria, gloria, sock it to me, sock it to me, gloria").

there was also something about my parents and my brother, the house i grew up in, walking a long way to get there, and operating a concession stand, but i've forgotten the details of that.