Writing All the Things ~ 7/16/2018

I dreamed I was helping write up an investigation of a fire at a burger place. At first the owner had claimed that the cause must be a bunch of fried chicken that a patron had brought in for his autistic son who wouldn’t eat burgers. His reasoning was that the chicken grease was more flammable, and must have gotten too close to the grill. But the truth was much stranger.

It turned out that, obviously, the fire had nothing to do with the chicken. There was actually a hitman after the owner, and one of the things he would do was set up a flash bomb to disable security cameras. It should have been triggered when the owner unlocked for the day, and he would have been assasinated at that time. But since the bomb didn’t go off, the hitman had to wait, and by the time the thing did go off, it caught the burger grease on fire, and police and firefighters came, so the job got called off.

Investigators had a pretty good idea who the hitman was, and knew of other hits he might be behind, but they didn’t have enough direct evidence yet. So that phase of the investigation was wrapped up and written up and I moved on to a different project.

Now I was assigned to work up the display text for an exhibit on a famous black dancer from the 1940s. Her stage name was Queen Matafa, and she would celebrate her 90th birthday while the exhibit was running. She was actually a Montenegran duchess, who was born in Ethiopia and married  into European royalty at age 18. But her duke had died penniless, and she had moved to America after becoming part of a ballet company who was contracted for an extended tour in the States. She’d been a sensation, and had never left.

Her birth name had been M’kheefe, and she was six feet tall, with size 5-1/2 feet. We had her shoes in the exhibit, as well as some of her costumes. I was working on the write up that went with photos of her visit with the Obamas during his presidency. We had some great quotes from Obama about M’kheefe’s importance both to America’s dance history and the African American community. Then I woke up.