Late Stage Pandemic Dream

Robert Smith is miming one of his early music videos. It sounds like “Fire in Cairo,” but it’s not.

He’s jangling his guitar at the end of a narrow white tiled hallway which you note has urinals along one wall, and stands-full of music magazines along the other wall.

Smith is wearing a white T-shirt with hand drawn scrawls and The Cure written on it. He dances a modified mashed potato while strumming his guitar. He then begins to do his version of The Robot, which includes some spastic movements—it’s not what you would have seen on Soul Train in the mid-1970’s, but it’s somehow endearing.

He turns away and continues dancing in front of a full length mirror.

You wish it would stop.

“Our children flock into the streets
with voices raised, their anger
a grim substitute
for song.”

— Brittney Corrigan / “Vanishing”