English oh English

Today in English had to be one of my favorites this year. We each read two essays (one that was due today, one due last time), and I was in a group of all girls. They are blonde. That's all the description they need. One very talented girl who is blonde but not so blonde wrote an essay about her first experience with kissing. Oh boy. I was trying so hard not to cry from laughing so much! My essay's were not nearly that funny. But apparently one was slightly humorous. I'll put it up here:

The lights dimmed. This was my cue to walk offstage. I knew that I had to change my costume before I came onstage again. I ran to the dressing room, beginning to unbutton my dress as I entered. I looked up at my friends and froze. Something was terribly wrong. Never in my theater experience had I encountered this dilemma. There was a boy in the dressing room. A boy. Perhaps one of the more shocking aspects of this was that the other girls didn’t seem to care. The group was talking as if nothing was wrong. I buttoned my dress back up, acted normal, and changed in the bathroom. I thought that surely he was only there momentarily and would be gone soon.

            I thought wrong. At the end of my next scene, I hesitantly approached the dressing room, only to enter and find the boy still there. I sat down on the floor, my mind racing with the challenge of trying to figure out what to do. Looking back it seems it shouldn’t have been a very hard decision, but at the time I was stuck. I knew this boy. He was very talented and I knew him to be uplifting towards other cast members. I didn’t want to ruin his reputation. I also didn’t want to be mocked by the other girls. There were so many of them and only one of me. Then I heard a girl say to the boy, “I’m about to change. Close your eyes.” This seemed completely unacceptable to me. The girl was entirely exposed, and her only protection was the boy’s eyelids which were not guaranteed to stay closed. The situation was still unfathomable to me. I had always thought these peers were so virtuous and proper, values clearly not being demonstrated here. For a moment my mind wavered, almost willing to overlook the situation. But I knew it was wrong.

            Luckily we were still in rehearsal, so I left the dressing room and approached the director in the auditorium, voicing my concerns. She was shocked at my news and assured me that things would change. That evening she announced that she would not tolerate students being in the dressing room of the opposite gender.

            The cast returned to the dressing room to change before we went home. I glanced at the boy and his outrage was obvious. It was surprising though that back in the dressing room, all of the girls were voicing their happiness that somebody had spoken up. Many girls were uncomfortable with the situation but were too afraid of their peers to stand up for themselves. Our peers have such an enormous influence on our lives, and many are so afraid of that influence that they cast aside their values or choose to overlook problems. They are scared that their peers will mock them. I used to be scared of that. Now I know that if I do what I know to be right, everything will work out.

Well that took a LOT of space... but hey. It's about three pages shorter than most essays in that class.