Frame Narrative

“Dramatic” was never a good word in my family. Anyone “being dramatic” was dancing on the precipice of a just punishment. It was an accusation one step short of being spanked for lying. 

We simply had no role models for what pop psychology might call a healthy theatricality. My maternal grandfather had been a rural fundamentalist minister. My maternal grandmother spent most of her life as his strictly fundamentalist widow. My paternal grandparents comprised a quiet, hardworking sales rep for a minor manufacturer of plastic dinnerware who married an even harder working housewife with aspirations to the bourgeoisie. No aunt, uncle, or cousin on either the devout or secular sides of the family had ever taken up acting as a hobby, much less a profession. We knew what movies and TV shows were. We even watched a few of them. But we tried not to be dramatic.

Then I went away to boarding school, a school with a theater company that put on regular plays, including musicals and dramas. I can tell you, just sitting awed before a brightly lit set where students I actually knew, students my own age, pranced, sang, and shouted while in costumes on the stage, well—it was dramatic.

For the next few years, the longing to be in theater and be dramatic reshaped me. I managed to get into a few high school productions, despite my diminutive stature and permanent limp. My best role I lost a week before opening night when I literally broke a leg. When I couldn’t act, I stage managed. I lured my family to a few plays and discovered my father had a secret fondness for musical theater. We took in a handful of Broadway shows. With my father and two of my sisters I saw, slackjawed, the original Sweeney Todd. My mother abstained.

At university, the theater groups were plural, but the auditions were daunting. After landing a few bit and character parts, I decided to try my hand at directing a group of my own. Winter of my sophomore year, I found myself hunting for some funding and a venue.

My opportunity arrived when I learned that there was a little unspent budget for a lapsed theatrical group. If I were willing to revive it under the same name, I could use the funds. Beneath a dormitory there was a decommissioned fall-out shelter that I got permission to use as a theater space.

That fall-out shelter, creepy as it was, inspired me. Just a week earlier, I had been at the campus art museum, looking at a Frank Stella painting. The thing that had caught me about its stark geometry of black lines turning parallel corners on matte grey wasn’t the content of the painting but the shape of the frame. In the upper left and lower right corners, where the marching angles approached the edge, Stella had cut the frame to match the shape of the approaching lines. Staring at it, I had blurted out to another student standing there, “The frame knows what it’s holding.”

Now, poking around the cobwebbed dark of the fall-out shelter, which had never been properly emptied, turning over cans of expired food and packets of bandages, I grew excited by the thought that I could pick a play to perform that let the space have a say in the content, that let the shelter become a frame that seemed to know what it was  holding.

I chose Say Goodnight, Gracie, a nearly contemporary play at the time, in which dope-smoking thirty-somethings reminisce about being teenagers during the Cuban missile crisis. I’d been only an infant during the crisis, but it haunted me that the world had come closest to nuclear Armageddon when I had barely been born. We used the leftover barrels and whatnot, some still marked with their black-and-yellow shelter symbols, to furnish the stage as props. It wasn’t a great play, but we were pleased, and if you look in my college yearbook for 1982, you can still see us, in character, five young things grinning from a black-walled stage and out of the black-and-white page at you. 

After dropping in and out of college a couple of times, auditioning for dinner theaters in northern New Jersey, and working a while as a stage manager for a traveling troupe that entertained in the Catskills and Poconos, I gradually wearied of being dramatic, but I retained my fascination for content-conscious frames. They’re everywhere in the arts, once you look. In architecture, of course, they’re cliche, "form follows function" and all that, but they’re most interesting to find where you don't expect them. 

Book bindings for example. Anonymously assembled medieval quires may seem at first glance nearly random miscellanies of unrelated poems and stories, but more careful reading reveals the arrangements to be deliberate, often ironic, and rich with implicit commentary. The form reached its zenith in those great works with explicitly narrative frames linking the miscellaneous pieces, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Boccaccio’s Decameron, but it can be found in the bundled quires still chained to the shelves as well. Most have been destroyed as people cut them apart for their favored contents, but the frames that are left suggest they were shaped to suggest they knew what they held.

It wasn’t until nearly thirty years after college that I thought of content-conscious frames any differently than as occasional, fascinating features of art. Six weeks after you were born, I composed a poem. You were napping on my chest, your mother was in the bath, and I was in a wheelchair with another broken leg, caught in my own body, holding your tiny body, your whole life rising and falling slightly at my every breath. It occurred to me that we ourselves are the frames that know our contents, the fixed theaters hosting our plays. We individual human bodies are the frames, the stages that can't escape ourselves, that constrain what we can never control. Every tune and tale performed within us may move on without us, may play in another town for other souls, but we stay framed as we are, until something or someone finally burns or tears us down. 

That was the thought that I framed as a poem. If it hasn't yet disappeared, you may still find it here. Then I couldn’t stop. I wrote day after day after that, framed poem after poem, until I'd composed and posted a few thousand more. And this? This is only another frame for the origin of all those poems, which are their own, other show. But now I'm just being dramatic again, as you know.