Glimpses of authenticity

A comment from Randy on my blog post about performance and meaning:

Those meta-moments when the teller drops out of the story to comment on the narrative, or when s/he realizes a common theme or word from a previous story and comments on *that*, are precious to me. Or when, as in this case, the teller senses his or her inability to get an accent right and says so ... these moves accentuate the situation of the event, how artificial it is, how we're here doing this and might be doing something else, like other people. Too much of that and the story spell is broken, but at the right moments it's delightful.

I had posted about a teller who had told us she was going to do a New York accent. The accent turned out to be essential to the story.

Randy’s comment reminds me of the RadioLab episode on wrestling (http://www.radiolab.org/story/la-mancha-screwjob/). People get really excited about those moments of real reality in wrestling. Saying you are going to do an accent breaks out of the performance and is an admission that the rest of what is going on is a performance. I think Randy’s love of these moments is like viewer’s excitement over unscripted moments in wrestling, like genuine surprise on the face of a wrestler.