Most of my life has become wrapped up in stories, and I sometimes get a case of vertigo when I'm put on the spot and have to tell the unvarnished truth. The Showcase aspires to tell the truth about a particular time and place—Philadelphia in the 1980s—and to do so by unraveling the intimate lives of ordinary people, individuals coming of age in the decade when America was transformed into a different, less hopeful place than it had once been. The stories of The Showcase also consider the act of storytelling itself, asking, in various ways, how one's version of oneself is fashioned and refashioned, mythologized and, as sometimes happens, turned into fiction.