Pipe Dream

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Anne Louise. I’m calling from San Diego.

Hi, Anne Louise. Welcome to the program.

Hi, Anne Louise.

Thanks. My friend and I, we work together and we keep long hours and sometimes we joke about ever seeing the sunlight. And my friends will always say that it’s a pipe dream. And we started wondering where that expression could have come from.

What’s your pipe dream? What are you dreaming of?

I dream of seeing the sunlight.

Seeing the sunlight?

Have you been kidnapped and locked in a dungeon?

We work for an opera company, so we rehearse all day and then we’re in the theater all night.

Oh, yay!

Getting outside when there’s daylight is sort of an impossible task.

Just have the gaffers put some amber gels on and you’re all set.

Yeah.

I believe it or not, sunlight isn’t quite the same.

Oh, okay.

And do you have your own speculation about what kind of pipe we’re talking about?

Well, I would think possibly like down the drain, you know, like, oh, it’s never going to happen, pour it down the sink sort of thing.

That could be one.

Yeah.

Or maybe the ethereal feel of music produced by organ pipes.

Oh, I didn’t think of that.

Well, that’s not the answer.

Well, you know the answer. You’re just leading her down the garden path, Martha.

I am. You know the answer.

I am. I know the answer.

I’m just trying to think of all the different possible pipes it could be.

Well, tobacco pipe, right?

Maybe light it on fire and smoke it? Yeah.

You’re getting warmer. You’re getting warmer.

Yes, but what are you smoking? That’s the question.

Yes, what are you smoking? And the answer is opium.

Oh, like an opium pipe?

Yes, exactly.

Yes, that is the answer.

These fevered, strange dreams that you get in the dark dens.

It’s kind of an opium madness.

Right, right. Those castles in the air you see, those are from the opium pipe.

I see a reference to the famous poem, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s been around since at least the 1890s, Pipe Dream, but we don’t usually think of it that way.

No, but it’s been figurative for quite a while.

Now that smoking opium in that way is less common, there’s a disconnect there.

But there was a while when there were crusades against smoking opium, it was the scourge of the inner cities and the scourge of the slums and the ghettos and the tenements and so forth.

So it was more common in the discourse, you know, the front page of the newspaper, so-and-so, found dead in an opium den.

And people knew about the effects.

Yeah, like in the old Sherlock Holmes stories.

Exactly, yeah.

He would go hang out there to try to get the latest news from the criminals to find out what was happening in Moriarty’s web, right?

Yeah.

So, Ann-Luigi, have your answer there.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for calling.

Go tell her.

Best of luck at the opera.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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