I'm playing a bit part in a play with a large cast. We are rehearsing, I believe in Waterfront Park. I am playing the lover of a pretty girl, standing around with her in my arms. At some point, she emerges topless from the crowd, says a prominent line, then melts back into the crowd, and back to my arms.

The crowd then moves into a dark wooden building, like an old boathouse. I'm standing off to the side with the girl, who is still topless, so I'm trying to hold her in such a way as to conceal her breasts, while it not being too obvious what I am doing.

Two main players burst into the room, played by D. Dorshimer/Baucomb and someone else who seems familiar, and spontaneous applause erupts when they appear - but it is applause as an audience to a favorite actor, not as our characters in the play. They are in some sort of verbal duel in the center of the crowd, dramatically quoting magnificent words in old-fashioned English.

Near to us, but in the cleared-out center of the crowd, I notice a baby suspended upside-down with some ropes from a metal frame about two feet high, and painted with mysterious markings, like Indian war paints, all over his body. I think the baby would probably cry, but it seems perfectly happy to be so suspended, looking around and baby-talking normally. I think it's the director's baby, so she knows what it would do, and it's according to her judgment.

Then one of the hero players, perhaps the villain, starts pushing the baby, swinging it. He pushes it gradually harder and harder, until he's pushing it too hard, and I have to step up and stop him. I say "hey, that's too hard to be pushing a real baby, if it is a real baby", but then a notice that it isn't a real baby, it's just some doll parts. I go back to my place in the crowd with the girl.

The topless girl and I are standing very close together, and we sort of accidentally kiss. But we both feel it, and slowly we start kissing some more, very gently. It's outside the script, and outside the scripts of our lives. But we both seem to acknowledge that it is too late. We're totally in love with each other, we kiss again, and I feel that familiar ache of the heart, that simple passion that wishes only for closeness, the same closeness that we accidentally feel now in our parts in the play.