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ceiling. When we arrived the doors hadn't yet opened, so the audience milled
about outside. Finally the time came and the ticket-seller wandered into the
lobby and yelled something like, “OK the doors are open”. Then as people were
driftingtowardthedoorshemovedintothemiddleofthecrowdandyelleda
complicated set of instructions that went something like this:
You can sit on the chairs or you can go to the back wall and look through the
windows or you can go up on the balcony, but don't lean against the side wall.
None of us could see the inside of the performance space as she was saying all
this, so we had no way of knowing what she meant by windows, side wall, back
wall, balcony, etc. This room has no windows or balconies, and so the yeller
must have been referring to structures that were built specially for the perfor-
mance. One could feel the crowd being uncomfortable, many of them turning
to their neighbors in an attempt to get clarification. I found myself trying to vi-
sualize the scene, but I had no idea how to place even the “side wall”, much less
the balcony and the windows. Both the impossibility of visualizing the scene
and the effort spent trying to visualize it seemed to make the instructions un-
usually hard to remember, as if they were nonsense syllables, and several people
could be heard repeating parts of them over to themselves or to their neighbors.
I found this amusing, and adopting a gently ironic imitation of the register
and diction of the yeller I said something like, “you can stand between the
monsters but don't sit on the toadstools”. Not many people got the joke, I'm
afraid, and especially not the yeller. I found this interesting in itself. The yeller
was obviously familiar with the room, and she presumably had no problem
visualizing what she was talking about. She evinced no awareness that others
might be having a problem.
Once inside, there was an audible rush to attach the words to parts of the
room, which was dark and full of peculiar wooden structures. The “side wall” is
immediately there on your right, verifiable by the readily visible chairs along it,
and the “balcony” could be found along the back wall with a little scanning. The
“windows” weren't at all obvious; they were windows in the wall supporting
the balcony, behind which one could stand. I suggested we go for the balcony;
although no stairs were immediately visible it was obvious where they should
be and others were already headed that way ahead of us.
In this story, the peculiar relationship between the instructions and the
physical setting disrupted an aspect of language understanding that normally
goes unremarked. The situation resembles the mnemonist's method of loci: if
someone tells a story that happens in a familiar space - or a space for which
you have a cultural model, such as a story set in a generic Western kitchen -
