This is an exerpt from Tennessee Williams' introduction to a collection of his plays. I think he shared this because he was trying to explain how it was to be a writer. I love this little story. Williams has that keen sense of observation and painful understanding that only an outsider can have. An acutely self-aware and highly intelligent outsider, that is.
"I once saw a group of little girls on a Mississippi sidewalk, all dolled up in their mothers' and sisters' cast-off finery, old raggedy ball gowns and plumed hats and high-heeled slippers, enacting a meeting of ladies in a parlor with a perfect mimicry of polite southern gush and simper. But one child was not satisfied with the attention paid her enraptured performance by the others, they were too involved in their own performances to suit her, so she stretched out her skinny arms and threw back her skinny neck and shrieked to the deaf heavens and her equally oblivious playmates, 'Look at me, look at me, look at me!'
"And then her mother's high-heeled slippers threw her off balance and she fell to the sidewalk in a great howling tangle of soiled white satin and torn pink net, and still nobody looked at her.
"I wonder if she is not, now, a southern writer."
