#695 Find Me a Dream- Kurt Vonnegut
Creon, Pennsylvania is home to the country's largest Forge and Foundry making sewer pipes. Like any industrial town, the whole culture is all about that industry. Pipes, Pipes, Pipes. Everything is named after pipes, and everyone somehow works for pipes. Almost everyone. Andy is the local band leader, but that is not as fun as it sounds. In a town that is so obsessed with it’s business, nobody takes the time to hear the music:
“Those people don’t hear anything that isn’t about pipe. When they dance, do they keep any kind of time to the music?”
“How can they dance…if the men spend the whole evening in the locker room, drinking, shooting crap, and talking sewer pipe, and all the woman sit out on the terrace, talking about things they’ve overheard about pipe, about things they’ve bought with money from pipe, about things they’d like to buy with money from pipe?”
When he befriends a woman crying alone, his life changes. She is the widow of a famous New York jazz musician and is now engaged to marry the Foundry Forman. That is why she is crying, running away from her problems she ran into the arms of a rich business man and now she realizes that life has no music in it…but Andy’s does.
This is a pretty shallow look at love. I like the small town satire, but the portrayal of the woman is a little too misogynistic. Not my favorite Vonnegut story.
Notable Passage: “I think everybody young is basically a great lover. All anybody needs is the chance.”
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