The piece by Steve Winn in today's SF Chronicle about stand-up performers made me ponder whether bloggers who talk about themselves (like I do here) raise the same issues as the performers:

What are we actually getting when performers stand up and talk about themselves? Where does offstage end and onstage begin in first-person theater?

The answers are complex -- bedeviling to performers and directors and endlessly alluring to audiences. We're instinctively drawn to stories that arrive in the envelope of truth.

Believing that the artist standing before us actually lived through the experiences he or she re-enacts has a kind of testimonial power. We become de facto participants and fellow travelers in shows by Spalding Gray, Marga Gomez, Reno, Tanya Shaffer, Tim Miller or anyone else who chooses to stand and deliver autobiographically onstage.