“Thank you, enjoy your movie!” God, I feel like I’ve been saying those words every five minutes for the past three years. I’ve worked at this movie theatre, Warren’s cinema, since I was 17. It doesn’t pay me much money but it just barely gets me by. I grew up in a poor family right outside of New York City with my two brothers and one sister. My mother was a waitress at the old Tugboat diner and my father was constantly jumping around to different jobs. I was the oldest of the four kids so I also helped to bring in money to our family.
Though my family wasn’t wealthy, we always held ourselves to a high standard. We went to Church every Sunday and the boys dressed in their best suits and the girls in their dresses. My parents taught my siblings and I good manners and ethics.
I got my first job at the age of 13 at a bakery. I didn’t know one thing about baking so for awhile I just did the cleaning and maintenance. However, the longer I worked there, I learned more and more. Jimmy, the owner, started letting me open and close the shop. However, times got desperate and my father had been laid off his current job. So I started stealing from the bakery. Jimmy was clueless to why the bakery wasn’t doing as well as it had once done and he was eventually forced to shut down the shop. I had been the reason. Not only was my family hungry but I had lost my job.
When I lost my job, my mother fell into a deep depression and ended up committing suicide. It broke my family apart and we all felt responsible. My father ended up leaving my family. He left me with my siblings, to fend for ourselves.
I eventually found, what is my current job today, working at the cinema downtown. On my first day, I came in with a buttoned up shirt and skirt on. The manager confronted me and said, “What are you wearing? This won’t sell. You need to draw them in . He unbuttoned my shirt and made it easier to see my cleavage. This made me extremely uncomfortable but eventually became apart of my routine. He put me in the glass box and my face was covered by the speaker, forcing people to look down at my breasts. People passed through everyday, couples, families, and friends. It felt as if I was nothing. I was just a pretty girl who sold movie tickets. I had lost everything, if the bakery hadn’t closed would things be different? If I had just maintained my morals and ethics. I acted so sweet but in reality I was dying and hurting inside.
Hello, my name is Mary… nice to meet you.
4 comments:
Okay so I literally love this. The relevancy to the current day and age with all the sexual assault accusations coming up, this was really impacting. I think the author's purpose was to elaborate on how women are sometimes seen a assets instead of people, and she absolutely nailed it. I really really enjoyed this. Good job Brooke. :)
i think the purpose was that don't do anything to mess up the good things you have. the main character had something good going for for her, but then tried to take advantage of it, lost it, and then ended up with something worse than she originally had.
~anonymous~
I think the purpose of this story was to show how girls are looked at and forced to behave in certain industries. It also talks about how you should not constantly be wanting more: She was making alright money at the bakery and she was fine doing it, when she began to steal from it, it shut down and she was forced to work a sexually abusive job that destroyed her mental health.
i feel the purpose of this narrative was to show how women are sometimes viewed in society. just a sexy image to make things more profitable. no one saw her for who she was but only her body because she was a woman. love it brooke #lookwhosbecomingafeminist
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