I Dreamed a Dream in Times Gone Bey
& it went something like this
*
I’m in the far-right front row of a concert (I’m talking a full-blown, pull-out-all-the-stops, basketball-stadium-deal with a speaker system to shake your organs to salt, plus enough back-up dancers to fill the Vatican) in a city whose name I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. Tonight is my night.
My friend Sydney’s with me, our bodies pressed against the stage, no security detail here to exercise crowd control. We scream over the bass, the beat, our vocal cords popping. I realize, as I sing along to every single word, that I somehow don’t know whose concert this is. I peer at the singer, trying to make out who she is. She’s caught in the blue and purple beams of the stage lights, glowing and holy, but something’s off with her face — it’s like in some studio of my subconscious, a video editor has blurred out her face, protecting her identity from the 11 o’clock news cycle.
Without warning, Sydney lands an elbow into my ribs, slamming me into the stage. She screams something I can’t hear, throwing rapturous arms toward the stage, lunging for a brush with glory (risking unwashed hands for weeks after) as the singer, decked in black and gold, struts her way toward us, her back-up dancers echoing each twitch and twist of her body, an orchestra of limbs and torsos. I’m still trying to see her face under the blur, when the song hits a break in the music; a fierce toss of her honeyed hair, and blurriness blows away. At last, I see — Beyoncé.
Then, inexplicably, the thousands of sweaty concertgoers jostling around us evaporate, as if beamed up by some invisible Scotty. Now a private concert, Beyoncé and her dancers (still singing like they’ve sold out Madison Square) serenade me and Syd, who has started weeping softly into my sweater. I start looking around the emptied stadium, wondering where the Beyhive buzzed off to, when it happens.
I’m not sure at first what’s going on, because her performance suffers no hiccups, no missed-beat hints at her humanity. She’s still singing, her lips perfectly in sync with the lyrics. But there’s no mistaking it: Beyoncé is talking to me. She even knows my name.
“You want to know a secret, Rachel?” she says. Why, yes, Beyoncé, thoughtful of you to ask. Who is Becky with the good hair? Instead, I just stare at her and nod.
“You can’t tell anyone, but I’m disillusioned with it!” her voice rising to a scream, as the first bars of Crazy in Love shudder through the stadium. I am now holding a sobbing Sydney in my arms.
“What?! What do you mean?” I yell after her, over Syd’s head. I can’t hear my voice, but Beyoncé does.
“With fame!” she yells back at me, each beat of her performance still flawless. “I’m disillusioned with fame!”
And now that she says it, I can see it. She does look kind of bored. Like choreography is only a series of steps, and lyrics just words strung together like a macaroni necklace from second grade art class. I’m trying to think of something to say to her when the stadium starts to crumble, then dissolve, into what I’m sure are the Blue Ridge mountains. The music shudders to a stop; the silence that follows stuffs my ears full of cotton.
Somehow the stage has survived the scene change, and Beyoncé, now dressed like Little Red Riding Hood, stands in its center. Her dancers have all disappeared, like the audience before them. I look down to see my arms are empty; Sydney’s vanished, too.
“What do we do here?” Beyoncé asks me, as she jumps off the stage and walks toward me. I don’t know that I have an answer until it’s coming out of my mouth.
“We have to pick the apples,” I say, as all around us, apple trees have begun to spring up out of the earth. They time-lapse into existence, thickening from saplings to maturity before our eyes, their branches laden with ripe apples: Gala, Granny Smith, Pink Ladies. Between their trunks, a group of children play tag, giggling. One by one, they scramble up the trunks, like squirrels scrounging for nuts.
One girl hangs back, watching us. She has more pigtails than I can count, springing out of her head like fireworks. She’s eating an apple, the juice dribbling down her chin.
“Hello,” Beyoncé says.
The girl doesn’t say anything, just smiles, and offers Beyoncé the rest of her apple. Beyoncé looks at me, unsure. I shrug, as if to say, go for it, I guess. Beyoncé takes the apple gingerly out of the girl’s hand and eats it.
The rest of the children start dropping out of the trees all around us, thump thump thump into the dirt. A lanky boy grins at us.
“Want to play follow the leader with us?” he asks, his friends (our fireworks-girl included) lining up behind him. Beyoncé laughs in delight, like it’s the best question she’s ever heard, like this is the moment that she woke up hoping for today.
And then they’re off, winding their way up the mountain, laughter and sparrows circling their heads.
I hang back, like a weary housewife, her apple pie still in the oven, watching them go from her kitchen window.
*
It’s been a while since my dream encounter with Beyoncé. Since then, we’ve both done our fair share of living. She’s been resting after the conclusion of her Formation World Tour, which wrapped up in New Jersey on October 7, and I’ve been in a perpetual state of trying to find my keys.
I don’t think about the dream too often, but when I do, I imagine her, lounging on the back of an elephant (or something)in Thailand (or somewhere), sipping a glass of her own lemonade. She’ll turn to Jay Z, who will be stretched out by her side (Blue Ivy nestled between them) and say,
“Did I ever tell you about the time our show — ”
“Ended up in those mountains with the apple trees?” Jay Z will say, before she can finish. “Yes, Bey. A hundred times.”
