Last night, I taught my adult education class as usual. The students' assignment was to prepare and present a 5-minute drama of their choice. We had people taking on Shakespeare, the Glass Menagerie, a hilarious Western version of David and Goliath, and many other classics. The final presentation of the day, the woman decided that she was going to present a play she had written. This was allowable for one of the assignments of the term, but one of the guidelines for presenting your own work was that you don't tell everyone it's your own work. It makes it harder for the audience to listen critically and open-mindedly when you know the person wrote it themselves. Anyway, she started off the presentation listing herself as the author. The play was called "Beautiful Me" and was one of the saddest things I've ever heard. The premise was a middle-aged single woman who feels ugly and gets plastic surgery to make herself feel better. The main character was supposed to be given a name different from my student's name, but she slipped and used her own name as the main character. So now, we not only know she wrote it, but we know she experienced it as well. I think it was supposed to be a tribute to plastic surgery and how it makes women feel better about herself, but in the course of the drama (which, by the way, took 15 minutes, not the allotted 5 minutes) we see her daughter crying as her mother gasps in pain and needs to wipe blood off herself and the mother asks the daughter to give her the medicine. Later, during the second surgery (I believe the surgery ended up being boobs, tummy tuck, face lift, and eye lift) we see that the daughters have left the house and the son is left to take mom to the bathroom because she can't see anything. We get the impression that she needs to be beautiful because her mother taught her that if she was beautiful, she'd act beautiful and make a better impression on other people and this is a message that she, apparently, is also teaching her own daughters.
So, the presentation ends and it's time for comments, which we do at the end of each presentation. The first guy to comment is pretty general about what he says, but the second lady is not so general. The woman who presented the play wore an outfit which showed off her boob job quite nicely, the "neckline" went all the way down. So the woman, who said she was going to be "big mamma" for this woman and tell her the truth, talked about how difficult it was to truly experience the presentation because she couldn't look at her. Later commenters made vague statements about "whatever works for you" and that kind of thing.
Now here I sit, the teacher of the class and younger than many of the people there. My expertise is in how to physically present the dramas that the students chose. I tell them how to do it and not what they are allowed to do. I am completely 100% against plastic surgery except for children born with birth defects or people who need it after major accidents. I believe that people who aren't comfortable with the way they look need to take care of their insides a lot more than their outsides, but I'm not teaching self-confidence and self-worth. I'm teaching oral interpretation. The only things I am competent to comment on are her clothing - I've told them not to wear "distracting" clothing when presenting their literature - and the fact that she told us she was the author. Yet I really wanted this woman to realize she's beautiful not because of what she looks like and what she wears, but because of the person she is on the inside. To my great relief, as I was finishing talking to students after class, I noticed "big mamma" talking to this lady about the clothing choices but also about plastic surgery in general. The lady had a lot of trouble hearing what "big mamma" was saying, I heard comments like "nobody has said this to me before" and "what's wrong with it" but "big mamma" was calm and considerate and continued to speak without getting frustrated and leaving. In fact, I ended up leaving before they did - a first! I am so grateful for people who are willing to take their own experiences and understandings and try to help others out. Too many times we don't want to hurt or offend other people and so we don't tell them the truth in love. I see it a thousand times in my classes. I ask for comments on speeches or other presentations that are horrendously bad, and everybody in the class has only positive things to say. A presenter looks up one time for one second and everybody says what great eye contact they have. Somebody gives a logically horrible argument, and everybody ignores that and talks about the great delivery. I understand not telling people they did a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad job, but let's at least be honest with others, right?
Anyway, that's my rant of the day. Feel free to take this as inspiration for your own ranting!
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