The Glass Menagerie

I have tricks in my pocket.

I have things up my sleeve.

But I am the opposite of a stage magician.

He gives you illusion which has the appearance of truth,

and I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.

To begin with, I turn back time.

I reverse it to that quaint period,

the '30s,

when the huge middle class of America was matriculating

in a school for the blind.

Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes,

and so were having their fingers pressed forcibly down

on the fiery brail alphabet of a dissolving economy.

In Spain there was revolution.

Here there was only shouting and confusion.

In Spain there was Guernica.

Here there were disturbances of labor,

sometimes pretty violent,

in otherwise peaceful cities such as Chicago,

Cleveland and St. Louis.

This is the social background of the play.

The play is memory.

Being a memory play,

it is dimly lighted.

It is sentimental.

It is not realistic.

In memory,

everything seems to happen to music.

That explains the fiddle in the wings.

I am the narrator of the play, and also a character in it.

The other characters are my mother, Amanda,

My sister, Laura,

and a gentleman caller who appears in the final scenes.

He is the most realistic character in the play,

being an emissary

from a world of reality that we were somehow set apart from.

But since I have a poet's weakness for symbols,

I use this character also as a symbol.

He is the long-delayed, but always expected,

something that we live for.

There is a fifth character in the play,

but he only appears

in this larger-than-life-size photograph.

This is my father, who left us a long time ago.

He was a telephone man

who fell in love with long distances.

He gave up his job

with the telephone company

and skipped the light fantastic out of town.

The last we heard of him

was a picture postcard from Mazatlan,

on the Pacific Coast of Mexico,

containing a message of two words.

"Hello.

Goodbye."

And no address.

You know, Laura,

I had the funniest experience in church last Sunday.

The church was full except for one pew way down front,

and in that was just one little lady.

So I smiled at her very sweetly and I said,

"Excuse me.

Would you mind if I shared this pew?"

"I certainly would," she said.

"This space is rented."

That's the first time I ever knew

the Lord rented space.

These Northern Episcopalians.

I can understand certain Episcopalians,

but the Northern ones, no.

Oh, honey.

Don't push your food with your fingers.

If you must push your food with something,

The thing to use is a crust of bread.

Oh, tom.

You must chew your food.

Honey, animals have secretions in their stomachs

that allow them to digest their food without mastication.

But human beings must chew their food

before they swallow it down.

Chew, hmm?

Chew.

Honey,

Eat leisurely, hmm?

Eat leisurely.

A well-cooked meal has many delicate flavors

that must be held in the mouth for appreciation,

not just gulped down.

Hmm?

So chew.

Chew.

Don't you want to give your salivary glands

A chance to function?

Mother.

I have not enjoyed

one bite at this dinner

because of your constant directions on how to eat it.

It's you that makes me rush through meals

with your hawk-like attention to every bite I take.

It's sickening.

It spoils my appetite,

all this discussion of animal secretions,

salivary glands, mastication.

Temperament like a metropolitan star.

You're not excused from the table.

I'm getting a cigarette.

You smoke too much.

Mother,

I'll bring in the coffee.

No, no, no, no, You sit down.

You sit down.

I'm going to be the colored boy tonight

and you're going to be the lady.

Well, no, I'm already up.

Well, resume your seat.

Resume your seat.

Keep yourself fresh and pretty for the gentlemen callers.

I'm not expecting any gentlemen callers, mother.

Well, honey, the nice thing about them

is sometimes they come when they are least expected.

Why, I remember one Sunday afternoon in blue mountain

when your mother was a girl.

Such a convocation stomped on our porch,

with chocolate and...

I know what's coming.

Yes, but let her tell it.

Again?

She loves to tell it.

And on that

Sunday afternoon in blue mountain

when your mother was a girl,

she received 17 gentlemen callers.

Sometimes there weren't enough chairs

to accommodate them all,

and we had to send a colored boy

over to the parish house to fetch the folding chairs.

And how did you entertain those gentlemen callers?

Well, I happened to understand the art of conversation.

I bet you could talk.

Well, I could, I tell you.

All the girls in my day could.

Yes?

Yes.

We knew how to entertain our gentlemen callers.

It's not enough for a girl to be possessed

of a pretty face and a graceful figure,

although I wasn't slighted in either respect.

She also had to have a nimble wit

and a tongue to meet all occasions.

What did you talk about?

Things of importance going on in the world.

Well, never anything coarse or common or vulgar,

because my callers were gentlemen,

Some of the finest men on the Mississippi delta.

Planters and sons of planters.

There was young Champ Laughlin.

He later became

Vice-president of the Delta Planters' Bank.

And the Cutrere brothers.

Wesley and Bates.

Now,

Bates was one of my own bright particular beaus,

but he got into a fight

with that wild Wainwright boy.

They shot it out on the floor of the Moon Lake Casino.

Bates was shot right through the stomach.

Died in the ambulance

on the way to Memphis.

He left his widow well provided for too.

Some 8,000 or 10,000 acres -- no less.

And he never loved that woman.

She just caught him on the rebound.

They found my picture on him the night he died.

And that boy.

That boy that every girl in the delta

had set her cap for.

That beautiful, brilliant young dixie boy

from Greene County.

Why did he leave his widow?

He never married.

What's the matter?

You sound as if all my old admirers

had turned up their toes to the daisies.

Isn't this the first one you mentioned

that still survived?

Well, he made an awful lot of money.

He went north to Wall Street and he made a fortune.

And I could have been Mrs. J. Duncan Fitzhugh,

mind you.

And what did I do?

I just went out of my way and picked your father.

Mother, let me clear the dishes.

No, no, no, no.

You go over there

and you study your typewriter chart.

You practice your shorthand a little.

Keep yourself fresh and pretty,

because it's almost time

for our gentlemen callers to start arriving.

Now, how many do you think