Cosmetics and Costumes

Our cosmetics and our costumes are so familiar to us that it is difficult to see the singular strangeness in the ways we make ourselves up. We emerge, all of us, out of our little night chambers, wherein we have temporarily lost our bearings in uncharted sleep, into the light of day, pausing to arrange our faces and clothe our bodies in a way that will naturalize us for the human company we intend to keep. Every day we achieve this dramatic transformation from nakedness into a socially serviceable appearance. Some days require several or even many changes of costume and of face, depending on the roles we are called upon to play.
In all of this we choose and select- grooming our bodies with more or less attention to the art of managing appearances. But our choices are always constrained by the affordances of our closets and cosmetic cabinets. These, in turn, are supplied from the vast but particular cultural wardrobe that is part of the large theater of our secular existence.

Boredom

To reject the practical, to change the purposeful into the purposeless, the necessary into the arbitrary, and to do it in such a way as to cause no harm, by simply imagining it, out of sheer playfulness, affords joy and pleasure, because it frees us for the moment from the fetters of the necessary, the purposeful, and the practical.

The Drama of Everyday Life

No fixed view of our reality can do justice to its features, for those features change in their meaning and significance depending on the perspective that is taken. This entire argument about a dramaturgical approach to psychology is nothing but a perspective, a particular point of view brought to bear on our subject matter -- ourselves and the world we live in. The special advantage of this perspective is that it enables us to see the intimate connections between the drama of everyday lives and our psychological processes-- our perceiving, thinking, social relations-- and our pathologies. An unsatisfactory view of reality is one that cannot shift perspectives-- so that one stands all of the time in the same box. No transformations, no drama, and the result is predictable and boring.

I have visited boxes of slam poets, square dancers, skeet shooters, schizophrenics, alcoholics, drug addicts, deconstructionists, missionaries, fishermen and farmers, football players, sports car buffs, bagpipe players, and country clubbers -- boxes of Carnaval-jumping Brazilians, fraternity pledges, and church deacons as well as psychologists and professors of various sorts. If you are blessed with a reasonabley long life, you will compile your own interesting list of boxes-- little theaters wherein the play is earnest and the players all convinced of their grasp on reality.