When Chuck Tilly asked me to write my afterthoughts about Art Worlds (Becker, 1982), I told him I could not do it because I did not have any afterthoughts. Not that I thought it was perfect. Far from it. But I thought it was done, that there was no more for me to say about it, although discussion on the topics it addressed would of course go on forever just as it had before I ever stuck my two cents in. He persuaded me to think about it some more, and insisted that the idea was not to start second guessing myself, or finding errors to be corrected, but just to say what I was thinking about now, what came to mind as I brooded about the book. Several things eventually did. Not surprisingly, what came to mind had mostly to do with what I have been doing since. We can always find a thread of continuity in what we do, even though it escapes others. So I can see in hindsight, although others may not, how and where Art Worlds brought some things I had been thinking about to fruition, and started some new trails I have been following since, with somewhat surprising results. One aspect of the continuity has to do with story telling. I was exposed, as everyone is in graduate school, to a wide variety of teaching styles. Louis Wirth, cavalierly, used to read his mail aloud to us in class, or translate Simmel from the German at sight (not such a great feat as we imagined, since German was his native language) and occasionally just read the German aloud, saying that it was too beautiful to translate. Herbert Blumer gave monolithic lectures systematically organized around the central points of his system of social psychology. Everett Hughes, whose student I became, gave lectures that although they often seemed a little disorganized to new students, were memorable in ways Blumer and Wirth's seldom were. One thing that distinguished Everett's style from the others was that he told stories. A lot of stories. Some about his childhood in Ohio, as the son of