Being yourself
Part of what Benjamin loves about Carapace is that you can be yourself:
You get to be yourself,
you get to tell stories.
And if they connect, then
there’s nothing better.
When tellers are sharing personal stories, and it is understood that the audience will be receptive and supportive that is going to have the effect of making people feel that not only their stories, but they themselves are being accepted.
It's interesting to me, too, that the person Benjamin describes as being accepted is the person as s/he is at the moment of telling the story ... a person who will soon change (in a month? Week? Day?) and may elect to tell the "same" story differently, or not tell it at all. This goes to what I think of as the existential edge of Carapace, immediacy manifest in a lot of ways. An edge that was betrayed when we recorded the shows, and when WABE had the cable-TV version -- which, let me say quickly, most of us loved! At the same time, to isolate and replay a moment that has passed means a sort of distortion or brutality to that moment, at least in true personal storytelling. I think so, anyway.
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