Andrew's response to "When the Other Dancer Is the Self" by Alice Walker

This was a wonderful and insightful read for me, in which I gained enlightenment and understanding to others misfortune and how one was able to overcome her misfortune and use it to her advantage later in her life. The story starts off with a spoiled brat two year old in a considerably large but poor family. The father is conflicted on who he should bring to the fair with him, for there is only enough room for three. This is when his little two year old girl (the author) comes up and had the audacity to say that she should be chosen to go to the fair because "she is the cutest". Well, she got her just desert, when her brother "accidentally" shot her in the eye with a bebe gun. The author goes on and complains on how her "horrible disfigurement" restrains her from having a social life, and how the other children "hurt her feelings." This gives her the motivation to become a writer (as, I have found, that most writers come out of misfortunes in their childhood) and she begins to write poems about her crippling defect.

The story goes on and it starts to get better, she mooches off of her rich brother and persuades him to have the white goop removed from her eye. After this is done, her ego becomes so inflated that she finds herself falling under the illusion that she is the most popular and prettiest girl in school, that she had found the "perfect boyfriend" (which is highly improbable for there have been studies conducted that show that I am the perfect boyfriend, thus my current status of being single because no one is perfect enough for me), and she then crowns herself as queen in her leaving of her high school. She then marries this man, has a child, and the child. As she is tucking her child into bed, her child notices something, an odd imperfection in her eye, and subtly says "your eye is ugly" in a way that she wouldn't get in trouble, and was actually taken as a compliment by the author.

This reading shows the many ways that if one can get over their misfortunes and start focusing more on their goals, that they too can follow their dreams and succeed in anything they put their minds to.