ADAM TRUBACK, a burnt-out high-school English teacher has a recurring dream. In it, he meets a beautiful woman at a 1950's inner-city bar. Then on one cold December afternoon in 2012 he disappears from his back yard in suburban Philadelphia, and reappears on the side of Route 66, forty miles out of Amarillo, circa 1950, 110 degrees. After a period of panic and confusion, and discarding his winter clothing, he sits contemplating his options when along comes a flashy Buick driven by a young man, BRAD, who picks him up. They become quick friends on a Route 66 road trip from Amarillo to Los Angeles. On a stop in Las Vegas, Adam draws on his knowledge of the future to win enough money to get by. In Vegas, he also meets ANNABELLE, the girl from his recurring dream, and convinces her to accompany him and Brad to L.A. In Venice, California, the home of the West Coast Beatnik culture, Adam lives out his fantasy of a stimulating existence with Annabelle. During the day in Venice, while Anabelle works, he wonders the Venice Ocean Front and discovers a Free School experiment being conducted at the Venice Pavilion. He volunteers his services and spends his days developing a sense of what a curriculum of choice and spiritualism is like. But the drudgery of everyday life with the erratic Anabelle -- making money, getting along, sharing chores, and having very different perspectives on a variety of things, including love and fidelity -- betrays the dream. In dreams, love couples do not have differences. Which is why (and here's the moral of the tale) we don't want our romantic dreams to become real. Surrendering Annabelle to her next dreamer, and bidding Brad a fond farewell, Adam is transported home, with a new understanding of the possibilities of schooling and starts an inner city free-school with drug money from a committed member of the community, something that will open the minds and spirit of his students.
About the Author: Carl Weinberg was born in Philadelphia and as a long time Phillies fan learned early the value of wit and humor in dealing with disappointment. As an inner-city high school teacher, he observed how failure in school crippled the hopes of his students. Later, as a college professor at UCLA he published a number of books and articles dealing mostly with kids at risk and their struggle to survive the institutions supposedly set up to serve them. The amusing ways in which students and teachers deal with the contradictions of education led to an early publication of his trade book entitled Education is a Shuck. More recently, his book First Year in an Urban High School, co-written with his son, was published by Rowman & Littlefield. Since his retirement from the university he has been writing humorous fiction, mostly focused on how underdogs survive in a tough world... and sometimes even prevail.