Orchestra Shell

Last night I dreamt that I was riding with my husband along a highway when I glanced out the window and saw a clamshell shaped orchestra stage facing the road.  There was no immediate space for an audience, but there were huge speakers pointed out toward the surrounding area and under each interstate bridge so that the sound from the performance carried over a great distance.  As I noticed the concert shell, I saw a group of female musicians filing onstage - I knew about half of them and was pleasantly surprised.  I told my husband what I saw and we starting talking about possibilities with it for our band.  So, we turned around and went to check it out.
By the time we got there, the band had quit playing and left the stage.  It turns out the stage was connected to a large reception hall on the back.  There was a reflecting pool in the front of the stage, and a small amphitheater area for audience seating that was low to the stage and couldn't be seen from the surrounding areas.  My husband found the person to talk to about the stage as a venue for our band as well as about locating the tuba and accordion players we are looking for.  I started visiting with a couple of little girls - one in particular wearing a large, poofy, ornate costume hat decorated with feathers and ribbons and braids.  "It's called a 'bouffant,'" she said.  "It's French."
"It's very pretty," I replied.
We laughed and danced, then I fingered the long, blond braids that trailed from the back of the hat and asked her, "Where did you get all this hair?"
"Well," she began, "Grandma had a beard."
I laughed so hard I had tears streaming down my face.
She looked at me very seriously and asked me, "How long have you been a kid?"
"About 44 years," I told her.
An old lady sitting next to me took a microphone and announced, "People of Sandy City, it is time for you to go to sleep now.  Turn out your lights." And she began to sing a lullaby in her warbly mezzo-soprano voice.
My husband and I left the venue and resumed our journey.  What had seemed like an appealing place to share our music had shown itself to be a means of mass mind control and we wanted no part of that.