Rachel prides herself on not being the typical and not being like anyone else. As she sits in the living room watching a game show, covered in popcorn kernels, and drinking soda her mother enters and watches her from afar. Something is just not clicking. Rachel is smart, very talented and in her mother’s, mind should represent herself a little bit classier as a “lady.” Rachel normally dresses the way she feels comfortable in t-shirt and sweatpants, she's messy and doesn't clean her room and her mother, who loves her, wants more for her. She wants her to be the presentation of what could potentially later in life be a Stepford Wife. Rachel wants none of it. She wants to be who she is, interesting how individualism presents itself in many different ways. Rachel finds herself at odds with her mother who then hands her a pamphlet for Charm School. She is whisked away to a place that she immediately hates. Everyone wears a uniform, the girls look the same, talk the same, and the woman in charge is everything that Rachel is not. But through her time and experiences there she realizes that who everyone wants her to be is not who she truly is. But it is when she makes a friend at the school named Nicolette that she starts to see both sides of this coin. Change is not always good for everyone, but it is good for some people and if we want to be accepted, we also have to open our minds to accepting those that find comfort in change, even if it is in a Charm School. As she reflects on all of the negative things that have been said about her, she realizes that the Rachel she wants to be is perfectly fine just the way she is.
Charm School
(Rachel, a teenage girl, sits watching a game show. She is animated with the way she interacts with the television as if the people on the show can hear her. She sloppily drinks soda and eats handfuls of popcorn dropping some on the floor and picking it up and eating it. She laughs.)
Rachel: (to television) What is the Taj Mahal. The Taj Mahal! (Beat, she cringes as the person gets it wrong.) How do you not know that? How can you call yourself a historian and not know that the answer to that question was Taj Mahal? This is ridiculous, this is absolutely ridiculous. (Beat. As she listens for the next question Mom enters watching Rachael chomp on her popcorn. Her mother is prim and proper, a “proper lady.” To television) Who is Betty White. Betty freaking White. (Aside) Please get this right. Please get this right. (Listening) Dorothy?!?!?! Betty White played Rose Nylund everybody knows that. (To mom) These people are super smart but don’t know that the comic genius of Betty White played Rose on “The Golden Girls.” Shameful. (She sits and continues to chomp as Mom stands over her watching. Rachel looks up and offers her some popcorn then soda. Mom is a little disgusted.) Geez it’s just popcorn and grape soda. You’d think it were poison.
Mom: Might as well be, all the chemicals in them.
Rachel: It’s a snack.
Mom: It’s a heart attack at forty.
Rachel: Well, perfect then I have decades to turn this around. (She laughs, Mom does not. Mom takes the remote and turns off the television, Rachel sighs.) What now?
Mom: Work.
Rachel: What work? It’s Saturday.
Mom: Your car is a mess-
Rachel: You bought it for me.
Mom: Your room is a mess.
Rachel: Totally clean.
Mom: Pushing all of your dirty and clean clothes into your closet and forcing the door closed does not constitute clean.
Rachel: (surprised) Oh, you figured that trick out.
Mom: (rolls eyes) You have everything you need and want and yet here you sit on a Saturday in a filthy t-shirt and sweatpants, I don’t even own sweat pants, and all your father and I have begged you for since you were five was to act like a lady. (Rachel burps) A proper lady.
Rachel: This is what being a lady is for me.
Mom: Well, it is no longer acceptable. (Mom looks away. Rachel sits up. Something is definitely different.)