jessica simpson's legs

I dreamt that Jessica Simpson had been struck by a car some time during the peak of her fame (during that short-lived TV show she had with her short-lived husband) and injured so badly that she had to have her left leg amputated below the ankle. Like FDR, she had hid her disability from the public so that she might not be shackled by its bigotry, but it was time to come clean, via 20/20.

Jessica Simpson was bravely baring herself to John Stossel with her voice vibrating but never failing. She addressed the camera and confessed her fear of public rejection, and then the camera zoomed in on a pantyhose advertisement she had modeled for. In the advertisement she lay against a projection of Van Gogh's "Starry Night" and showed off her smooth, slender legs, which were in fact not encumbered by pantyhose, and which were evocative of the gentle bends of summer streams, the floating curves of airborne ribbons, and the blue silhouette of a monumental range on the far-distant horizon. The camera lingered at her ankles.

"I was hit by a car," Jessica Simpson said in voice-over for a reenactment of the tragic night. "I just didn't see it coming." As she spoke, a blonde stepped in slow-motion into the path of a black GMC pickup and was spun like a sparkling spinner against the black night. She came crashing down at full speed and again the camera lingered, this time on a thin seepage of blood coming from underneath a blond mass of hair.

"I knew I was hurt really badly, but I just didn't know how bad it could be," Jessica Simpson said to John Stossel. "Can we see it, Jessica Simpson? said John. "Can the people of America see what's happened to our princess?"

Jessica Simpson hesistated, then slowly removed her left boot and raised the hem of her bootcut jeans. John Stossel gasped, for there was simply nothing - nothing at all to mark her tragedy except the clean absence of her foot. Her left calf ended in a straight, stiff cut, as if run under a circular saw, as if her foot

had been detached by its sculptor and purposely left in the grill of a GMC pickup speeding westward on Wilshire Boulevard.

Jessica Simpson tearily resolved to leg model again. John Stossel spread the brush of his moustache with a grim but hopeful smile and said, "All of America is behind you, Jessica Simpson." The scene faded slowly to black, as if to suggest the passage of time.

Then Jessica Simpson was preening and posing against a projection of Van Gogh's "Starry Night." "How do you feel about this opportunity, Jessica Simpson?" exclaimed John Stossel. "I want to thank all of America!" Jessica Simpson returned. ABC News had paid for Jessica Simpson to reshoot her famous "Starry Night" pantyhose advertisement; it would be blown up to gargantuan proportions and plastered against fourteen stories of an apartment building on the corner of Houston and Broadway in Manhattan and would bear the discreet logo of a non-profit dedicated to the restoration of severed limbs. The photographer's index finger fluttered over his shutter release, and the flash reflected unflatteringly on the veiny skein of a recent, overzealous collagen infusion. But luckily for Jessica Simpson, the photographer focused on her legs, and snapped photograph after photograph of the cylindrical ending of her abbreviated left leg.

The television camera froze on one close-up, and then unfroze and zoomed out to reveal the foot traffic on Houston Street beneath a blown-up version of the snapshot. Jessica Simpson stood on the sidewalk, smiling up at her advertisement as pedestrians coursed around her. "It was like she knew she was right where she belonged," said the voiceover of John Stossel, "Right at her feet."

[This is not the first time I have had a vivid dream about a leg being cleanly severed from something. See, e.g., this.]