This summer, I had a dream about Madonna. As much as I love her, this was maybe only my third or fourth actual dream about her. In it, we were finding our way through an old warehouse. Boxes of all my Madonna memorabilia were stacked all around, but they were rotting. A pile of pulpy mush was topped with her ‘Sex’ book: the aluminum covers and spiral binding the only things that remained intact from that cantankerous career period that remained such a favorite with die-hard fans like myself. She was walking through barely glancing at my collection, mostly because she was with her family, and I felt like I was encroaching. Yet somehow she didn’t mind my following along.
She spoke quietly to her children, in a gentle fashion slightly at odds with the brash persona she so often peddles in public life and artistic projects. She also spoke a bit to me, and I tried to sound like a human being in spite of my star-struck awe, while still conveying how much of a devoted lifelong fan I was. Friends have asked me what I would even say to her if I had the chance to meet her, and I still have no idea. It’s so far from the realm of possibility, I never bothered to entertain such a dream. Here, in an actual dream, I must have said something she liked, because she kept speaking to me as we walked through a dirty warehouse littered with the products of her artistic past. It made me giddy to realize it was my past as well, and somehow, after all these years, I could see that we were intertwined, in the way that her artistic output intertwined with all of her fans. We shared something that way. Isn’t that the purpose of art?
