I had to earn that Princess title at the knee of my mom, the Queen of Sarcasm. And 'sarcasm is despicable,' so . . . But enough about titles.

I'm not sure if the dream awakened me two hours before the butt-crack of dawn (blame my daughter for that one) or remembering I said I'd make potato salad for our company this afternoon (I'll be like Nora Efron and include the recipe), whatever the reason, I vividly remember dreaming the following:

I was a dancer; not a club dancer, or a ballerina, or one of the Rockettes; more of an abstract dancer, like Isadora Duncan I suppose. I was walking in the streets of New York City with a male friend who also danced. If you've never been to NYC (and it's been a long time since I visited) you can barely see the sky when you're on certain streets because the skyscrapers are so tall. This dancer-friend and I were skipping down the street toward the United Nations Building, which I had relocated in my dream to . . . Madison Avenue, maybe? I also changed the architecture of the building and added a huge, glass enclosure that allowed people to walk above and look down through the glass at the assemblies. So the other dancer and I were up on top of the glass walking around and watching the people below, when a heavy object fell from another building and went through the glass roof. We could see more stuff falling from the surrounding buildings' windows and were trying to dodge the junk, knowing the stuff was heavy enough to kill us. I went to the edge of the glass dome and tried to hide in a crawl space between the UN and the building a couple of feet away. And mind you, this glass enclosure was several stories high, I looked down to the alleyway between the buildings and just missed being smashed in the head by a falling metal filing cabinet. My friend disappeared and I scrambled down to the street to find out what was happening. Somehow I learned that the government had announced a huge audit of all the books of all the bookkeepers at all the businesses in NYC and elsewhere and the accountants were frantically trying to destroy their bogus books. The punishment for their crimes was going to be so severe they decided they'd take their chances with telling Uncle Sam they'd intentionally destroyed their records than let him see what the actual reports. I somehow ended up in a suburb of NYC and was living inside a huge, beautiful mansion with about 50 other unemployed, not-very-well-dressed people. We were all just sort of milling around in this mansion and there was no furniture in any of the rooms and no food anywhere. But we said we were lucky to have the nice roof over our heads. I decided to take a walk with a young boy in the group and we were walking in an overgrown field. Across the street from the mansion was a row of cracker box-type, pastel colored small houses that were boarded up. The boy asked me about the houses and I said, "The people who owned those houses were forced to move away." Why they weren't with us in the mansion remains a mystery. When we got back to the mansion it too was empty and locked and we followed the road down to a place where ALL the people from ALL the homes had gathered. I think we were making "Stone Soup." It kind of reminded me of the end scene in Fahrenheit 451.

Any Freudians out there? Oh, the symbolism if pretty obvious, I suppose, but I thought someone out there might enjoy hearing about one of my many wacky dreams. And here's my potato salad recipe:

2 1/2 lbs. smallish (not the tiny ones) red potatoes

4 hard boiled eggs

1/2 cup chopped celery

1/2 cup chopped onion

1/4 cup chopped scallion greens

2 T chopped dill weed

3/4 cup mayonnaise (I used Hellmans with e.v. olive oil. It's pretty good.)

1/4 cup yellow mustard

salt to taste

I cut the potatoes into kind of large cubes and boil them while I hard-cook the eggs. Don't overcook the potatoes or you'll have mashed potato salad (hmm, that might not be bad.) I put the potatoes in cold water when they're el dente. I mix the chopped ingredients with the mayo and mustard then fold in the chopped eggs then the potatoes. I let it marinade on the counter for a while. Mine needed extra salt. You get the idea.

What!? I told you I'm weird! And no, I'm not drunk or stoned! I just have strange dreams and I like potato salad.