This is the first dream (first hour, in fact) of January 1, 2014. Wednesday.
My dream mostly involves watching a live stage and audience-participation performance of "Ragtime Cowboy Joe" that keeps going on and on...and on. It actually gets fairly tedious and there is a mechanical bull contest as well. Even a barbershop quartet sings it as they move to various locations around the Concordia in Wisconsin (setting), where my father performed it in real life years ago (as well as on the radio shows many years back), the hall of which seems filled with people from various time periods, even the "roaring twenties". There is also a loose association with "Table Top Joe" ("Alice" album by Tom Waits).
Real-life memories come back indirectly and then more fully. I had planned a "jumping-jack" puppet show using thinner but commercial cardboard cutouts (from the Popsicle product) and Popsicle sticks, but decided it was not professional-looking enough. It was "Ragtime Cowboy Joe" we (the other students and I) had planned. Instead, I basically ruined the show with a dog hand-puppet and my voice could not be heard so I just introduced the next classmate (who could not hear me until I slowly yelled his name a couple of times - ironically he is now a well-known singer based in Germany), accidentally (absentmindedly) calling his seashell collection "rocks". He was not quite prepared yet and did not look too happy and blundered his way through the names and locations in a seemingly sad voice.
That memory triggers a similar later real-life scene (from fifth grade, likely because of the line "How they run, when they hear this fellow's gun" of the former song) where I used finger-puppets. (Can you imagine someone in fifth grade using finger puppets at a performance in this day and age?) It was a family of rabbits. I can still remember "Bang bang went the gun, see the little rabbits run" which I intoned so mechanically, the whole class sat dazed. My face felt hot for an hour. However, I was involved with other shows that were not that bad.
The third memory before shifting back to the maddening crowd is when my father made a life-sized jumping-jack puppet from thin wood and old antenna cord, representing a "Martian".