How can writing be so epic and spare at the same time? The story is an inch wide and a mile deep.
The word for today is "tableau":
Some years ago I became the custodian of a plush velvet album with photographs, bits of ribbons and black fabric, Czech newspaper clippings and handwritten letters. The album had been a family hot potato, being mailed, handed off, or left on doorsteps like last year's fruitcake because none of us know the people in the album or speak Czech. We are just sure the album might be important to keep. I'm guessing that the young woman in this photo might have been creating a tableau.
tableau [tab‐loh] (plural ‐leaux or ‐leaus), a ‘picture’ formed by living persons caught in static attitudes. Tableaux were sometimes used at the ends of acts in 19th‐century melodrama and farce. The parlour‐game of tableaux vivants (‘living pictures’), in which living people adopt the postures of characters in a famous painting, was also a popular diversion in the 19th century, and is sometimes found in modern pageants. In a story or poem, a description of some group of people in more or less static postures is sometimes called a tableau.
[Also, my dad is doing better, out of pain, eating like a bear, slipping out of bed, and nutty as can be. Today he is saying, "G A N E L G E". If you can figure that out, please comment!]
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