“The World is a Wedding”
The author suggests declares that, in truth, the world is a wedding. This metaphor is apt, but goes deeper than it may seem. This is not the most direct metaphor made in the book nor is it the most encompassing, but it speaks to a truth: who is ever really themselves at a wedding? Everybody is performing a role; from the bride to the photographer to the caterer to the guy out there who can’t believe he wasn’t chosen as best man. Life is a performance.
Is Life Really a Gamble?
The author insists—well, suggests—that the answer to this question is…probably not so much:
“Life may not be much of a gamble, but interaction is.”
Life goes on as it will because life is a performance and a performance is dependent upon interaction. So, the gamble then becomes, really, not one based on life, but based on the performance one brings to the interaction. The roll that comes up snake eyes is not necessarily the one life delivers; a different performance could have brought home daddy’s new pair of shoes.
Servitude
The presentation of self in everyday life is not merely dependent upon the presenter. The author uses metaphor somewhat obliquely to reveal that presentation of the self is often methodically processed for us to the point that many do not even realize the level of performance at hand:
“In the case of other servant-like roles in our society, such as that of elevator operator and cab-driver, there seems to be uncertainty on both sides of the relationship as to what kind of intimacies are permissible”
Gimbel's and Macy's (Apple and Android)
At one time (especially around the time the movie Miracle on 34th Street first became a hit) the two biggest retail rivals in NYC were Gimbel’s and Macy’s. The author uses the metaphor of “a Gimbel’s man in Macys” (and vice versa) to describe the way that certain presentations and performances have a dual layer of deficiency. In today’s parlance, it would be the guy Apple guy who is first pretending just to be a normal shopper attending inside a store selling just Android phones. But not only is not just an average guy, he is, in fact, something much more insidious.
Non-Secretive Secrets
One of the worst ways for two people to keep secret from a third person in the room is to whisper in front of that third person. The author suggests that there are performance presentations in everyday life that is every bit like this that most people don’t consider to be quite as obvious, but, in fact, actually are because these means do not preserve the thing that is even more important than the secret itself:
“this tactic, like whispering, is considered crude and impolite; secrets can be kept in this way but not the fact that secrets are being kept.”
