This is "pretty" in our town

A few years ago in english class we read a play called Our Town. A conversation from the play:

"Am I pretty?"

"Pretty enough for all practical purposes."

I'm sure my mid-pubescent eighth grade self skimmed a Spark Noted summary of this conversation the day before the assignment was due, an assignment much less relevant to my life than whether or not I should straighten or scrunch my hair for the school picture and whether the blonde haired boy in my biology class was looking at me today. Five years worth of puberty and gel-saturated hair, I realize that although the content of the play itself is hazy in my memory, this particular conversation has been immaculately preserved. Has, apparently, lodged itself somewhere deep within my prefrontal cortex.

I've often wondered what it is about this conversation that made it attach itself to my cerebrum and hang on surreptitiously for five plus years, long after the blonde haired boy and The Scrunched Hair Dilemma dissolved into the black hole of pre-pubescent memories. (Thank god for that black hole).

As much as I would like to say that physical appearances are superficial and irrelevant, if I'm being honest with myself, that could not be farther from the truth. As a society we romanticize and idealize beauty, place it on a pedestal and fuss over it. We say beauty is irrelevant, that it is less imporant than "a good sense of humor and a great personality," while we spend hundreds on teeth whitening products and makeup and push up bras, as though physical appearances define our worth as a person. Which, in doing so, has become the case.

I don't at all mean for this to sound feminist. I don't mean to argue that our idealization of physical beauty is wrong or right or immoral or appropriate or inappropriate or whatever.

It just is.

And that's why this conversation, from Our Town, is so relevant. To subjugate "prettiness" to "practicality," to say that one is "pretty enough for all practical purposes" seems unfitting and foreign. We like to think that physical beauty is intangible, that it's poetic and romantic and whimsical, a transcendent truth that surpasses all ideas of realism and practicality. But ultimately, what purpose does it serve but a practical one?

What purpose does anything serve but a practical one?