Mr. Clinton's legs and Mr. Cantat's toothpick

I haven't been keeping track of my dreams for a while, but I just thought this recent pair of celebrity cameos was amusing.

In the first, I was working as a personal assistant to Bill Clinton, who was writing his memoirs [didn't he already do that?]. We were sitting and talking about something that needed to be done, and he was complaining about his legs being irritated. He hiked up his suit pants to reveal skinny, pale Old Man legs covered with weird scratches* and equipped with some kind of weird braces possibly meant to hold up his socks.

The second cameo appearance was by a French rock star [who did something terrible in real life that I won't dwell on here]. In the first part of the dream I had been getting ready with some friends for a Halloween party that would take place later that day. I'd been combing through my wardrobe, cobbling together an outfit consisting of vintage items from the 40s through the 60s to go as "an extra from Mad Men", which I saw as a cop-out, but a fun one. I didn't realize what a weird mishmash it was until I woke up; in the dream, I had much more interesting and historically accurate hair (well, historically accurate for the 40s!), and the outfit was going to be tied together with a cute little hat and coral red nail polish.

Anyway, I'd left my preparations to go to an antique store, although not with the purpose of adding to my costume. I was there just to browse, but a group of people caught my attention. There were 5-10 people gathered in a little sitting area in the middle of the store, around a table with lots of drink bottles and glasses. It took me a minute, but I realized that it was a class on cocktail mixing, with an emphasis on imaginative combinations of non-mainstream ingredients. It was being led by a few people, but the big draw was obviously this French rock star, who wasn't teaching so much as he was just mixing things up, imbibing, and commenting vaguely on people's concoctions. He seemed to be getting bored as I stood there observing, and soon just gave up the entire show to a Maggie Smith-like lady who started theorizing about why people were drawn to flavors like carrot cake (sentimental childhood-related reasons, from what I gathered).

I'd been gradually approaching the group because the whole thing was intriguing, and had even sampled one girl's drink, which just tasted like grape juice. Mr. Rock Star seemed to find me interesting for some reason. I fancied that this was because I seemed blase and unimpressed by his status. He started gesturing with his head for us to get out of there, but I stalled by commenting further on the poor girl's grape juice facsimile. I eventually followed him out to a little vestibule that led to the restrooms, where I commented on his large, elaborately carved ivory toothpick (really! and no, I don't think that was some kind of phallic symbol). I restrained myself from commenting sardonically that fancy ivory toothpicks were a nice perk of the trade. For some reason he seemed very interested in spending some time with me (not that kind of time, he seemed more bored and lonely than anything else), but I had to politely brush him off because of the costume party.

What a weird combination of cameos.


*This detail was almost certainly inspired by that gruesome and sad Downton Abbey episode where Bates tries to cure his limp using a metal brace.