Carl Weinberg

Route 66 Carl Weinberg

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.