The Sensational Tabloid Tour

BEHIND THE MUSES Now, for the first time, Frankie N. Vitro presents an insider’s view of the series of events leading up to Frankie V’s instantaneous rise to celebrity and his consequent withdrawal to obscurity. Like all young people growing up in that day of age, Frankie was brought up in a barrage of disassociated, 2 dimensional images that overloaded his system with so many suggestions, threats, and promises that he never got to make any of them his own. He was stuffing his face with a diet of sound byte sized messages he couldn’t digest and never sitting down to a well balanced meal. While this constant crossfire continued on the outside, Frankie was trying to come to terms with all the contradictory impulses and responsibilities he felt on the inside. And all of this was taking place against the backdrop of cultural upheaval in the late 60s when traditional roles were being redefined and anything seemed possible. Frankie couldn’t feel grounded in one way of thinking or feeling. Several voices emerged amidst this chaos. People say he was becoming schizophrenic but we disagree. It is normal, even healthy, to hear these voices. If you don’t hear them, it just means you’re not listening. Typically, however, one voice become dominant and the individual identifies with it as his own. But Frankie wasn’t ready to let one voice speak for all of him. It would have forced him to give up too many possibilities. It would have forced him to accept moral discrepancies that he was too uncomfortable to live with. He was in a quandary. He couldn’t wholly identify with one way of facing life. That’s when I came forward. Eureka! It was so simple, so obvious, so elegant… If varying perspectives or voices were adopted in different situations, he could live with all the inconsistencies. The moral dilemmas could be avoided. Sense could be made of this whole quagmire of self. Peace could be made. I patted him on the back and said, “You know; you’re right!” This is the point at which I was conceived, so to speak; when I came into my own, if you will. And, in sense, I delivered all of the other characters. This isn’t the forum to go into all of the technical details of my work: the remarkable device- a microphone that amplifies the voices in my head, my breakthroughs in the field of presubvocalizationalanthropomorphosizology, or the therapeutic techniques I developed to bring out the characters. Suffice it to say that I lent credibility to these voices. I developed an incredible body of research, but the scientific community didn’t find my work credible. Then Veneer had The Vision. He (liberally) edited my body of research and sold it to the Sensational Tabloids. Then he made several marketing deals including appearances of TV talk shows and in major magazines and we took the show on the road. We had a nice run- Carnegie Hall, the Lincoln Center, the Gild Hall… But it all got to be too much. We started to fight amongst my selves; I guess we were growing apart. We went our separate ways. We didn’t talk for years, but I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say it feels quite good to get back together and play for you. Thanks.