Frank Brown's Bow Tie

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a dining room at closing: chairs going up, a cloth folded)
The man in the picture had a name. Start there. Always start there.

[Verse 1]
He was a maître d' in Chicago and his name was Frank Brown,
he ran a dining room, he knew every regular by name,
he wore the bow tie because the job required a bow tie,
and one day somebody asked him to sit for a photograph.
And that photograph went out on a box of rice
and stayed there for the better part of eighty years.

[Chorus]
Frank Brown's bow tie. Frank Brown's face.
Frank Brown's actual head on somebody else's name.
'Cause the "uncle" was invented. There was no Uncle Ben.
There's a story about a Texas farmer nobody can find.
Frank Brown's bow tie. That part was true.
The man was real. The uncle was a costume that they wrote for him.

[Verse 2]
Now "uncle" is not a neutral word and everybody knows it,
it's what you called a man when you would not say "mister" —
a title that sounds warm and takes a whole degree of standing
off a grown man in one syllable, and does it with a smile.
That's the part they finally said out loud in twenty-twenty.
That's the part that took a century to say.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And I want to hold two things at once, because both are true:
he was a working man who sat for a portrait and got paid,
and it is not for me to say he was diminished by it —
he had a life, a job he was good at, and a family.
But nobody asked him what the caption ought to be.
They took the face and they wrote the name themselves.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the last chair set down)
Frank Brown.
That's the name. Frank Brown.