Good Man

A girl walks down the street in her favorite dress: it’s a maroon satin dress with a sweetheart neckline and it goes down about mid-thigh length. With the dress, she’s also wearing thin tights and a pair of Rag & Bone booties she bought on clearance from Bloomingdales to treat herself for doing so well on her midterms last semester. She’s twenty years old, her third year in college studying on the premed track to one day become a doctor. She’s thin and blonde with blue eyes.

As she’s walking to class, she walks through the park where a group of men working on construction call out at her. They shout about how gorgeous she is and about how pretty she looks. The young woman doesn’t know what else to do, so she smiles at the out loud observations. The men shout so loud that a group of women hear these comments on this girl’s appearance, and look at her with disgust in their eyes. The women whisper among themselves about where this young woman’s parents were to teach her about how to dress and act like a lady. The girl continues to walk on, the voices all fading in the distance and continues on to organic chemistry lab. She feels happy about the comments she just received because she was happy with how she looked. She had been on a path to renew her health, as she had a heart attack her freshman year of college from taking poor care of herself, and just lost about one hundred pounds that could have promoted her death at any moment. The compliments started coming to her when she walked down the street after she lost around sixty pounds. She’s proud of the changes she made to her lifestyle and continues to think about what positive decisions she could make in the future as she enters the two large, white doors of the organic chemistry ...

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...In the end, it seems, that much of who we are is based on what we look like and how we do things. How we do these things influences the way we perceive ourselves. It all comes down to how much these appearances matter and to whom they matter to the most. Fantasy to be someone we aren’t and to see how much we can embrace these roles is a constant theme in Vincent’s collection of essays. We think highly of celebrities and admire them because they’re good at pretending to be other people. Vincent acknowledges this in the end when she talks about how she resists the “Hollywood temptation” (“Journey’s End” 296). To be someone else intrigues us, as inquisitive human beings, and it makes some of us think that we want to be other people. The master of disguise, Norah Vincent, seems to want to find a disguise that she can be permanently until “death” (“Journey’s End” 296).