The Proposal: the Starbucks Girl we Don't Notice

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Most people have seen the movie The Proposal, starring Sandra Bullock as Margaret Tate, a tough, mean Canadian boss and Ryan Reynolds as Andrew Paxton, her capitalist slave. The movie follows their shaken lives as they fall in love unexpectedly after fears of Margaret having to be deported. She then proposes to Andrew, they fall helplessly in love after a large ordeal back in Andrew's hometown which includes Margaret dancing to Lil Jon's Get Low with Betty White around a campfire, and they enjoy a nice happy ending.

But one key element is ignored in this movie, right at the very beginning, when Andrew wakes up quite late and rushes off to Starbucks to obtain a coffee for himself and Margaret. Once he enters the shop, he is confronted by a large line of sleepy business people, all waiting for that cup of caffeine. Something unexpected then happens, that key in the movie: the coffee barista at Starbucks, who does not even get a name in the cast lineup beside 'coffee barista', catches Andrew as he walks in and has already made him the coffees that he always orders. He is called to the front of the line, walking past all of the hustle and bustle contained within the line, collects the coffees and hurries off to work.

This 'coffee barista' leaves her cell phone number on Andrew's coffee cup, which had to go to Margaret because Andrew accidentally spilled his coffee on his way to her office, thus sacrificing both his coffee and the potential relationship between himself and little Miss Coffee Barista, thus withdrawing all the mental suffering he will go through on his way to Alaska with Margaret. Poor Miss Barista is then denied a mention throughout the rest of the narrative, and the rest of Andrew's short-lived life. And this is key because it symbolises us, those of us who in life which is not always short-lived, are left behind despite our unusually kind efforts to get somebody to notice us.

Knowing that Andrew was running late and that he would never miss a day of work nor his morning coffees no matter what, Miss Barista had already made them and placed them on a take-away tray for Andrew's further convenience, displaying an act of kindness, of utter love and a yearning of attention, acknowledgement, notice, none of which she ends up receiving. Miss Barista is the epitome of all those in life who are forgotten, who are rejected, who perform random acts of kindness only to be left alone in the end. Miss Barista went completely out of her way, risking a morning of receiving indignant remarks from those waiting in line just to be noticed, only to be unnoticed.

And unfortunately in life, this happens to most of us. Most of us are the living, breathing examples of Miss Barista. And there are Mister Baristas, too. The film goes on never showing her again, and that makes a comment on the Mister and Miss Baristas in life - they may go their entire lives performing good deeds to others only to remain unnoticed. 

Celebrity Lookalikes in Lectures and Tutorials

I have recently returned to university. I have returned to the familiar recurring pedagogical experience for the third time, next year being my fourth, and this year I am mixed with first year students who look like celebrities. Really popular ones, too.

Eva Mendes sat in my Reading Contemporary Fiction class, beside the person directly in front of me, to the left. Her long, dark brown hair rested to the left, then to the right, then to the left, then along her back, depending on the way her slender body moved throughout the tutorial. All I could imagine was Will Smith sitting next to her, quoting some lines from the movie Hitch - the lines which I cannot recall, for I have not seen the entirety of that movie, rather I have seen a glimpse of some scenes, and I did not happen to remember any memorable lines, memorable enough involving these two celebrities, though I did happen to see them together in one scene and that is the very scene that my mind had pictured throughout the entire class, when my gaze met hers. She has a Spanish heritage too, I can tell by the placement and shape of her nose, her skin colour, and her lips.

Beside her, Taissa Farmiga from American Horror Story: Coven, with similar long locks of blonde hair, though the way she plaited them had veered me off track when considering her lookalike for a while. Her constant look of concern, her quiet and shy demeanour, her slyness when she spoke, and the way she observed, and hardly did any movement. The way she just sat there warned me that she could indeed be a witch, and that at any given time she could raise herself from her chair, her feet lifted off the ground, waving her hands about in a frenzy, chanting spells so fast that a train-wreck would happen beside her in slow motion at a normal speed. I snapped out of my imagination, and regained focus on her, seated right in front of me, and chuckled nervously when she looked up at me as if she knew what I just conjured up in my mind, as if she was telepathically signalling to me that she indeed was part of a coven, and that what I saw was her reality, and if I dare spread the word she would burn me at the stake, even though I am not a witch. So I kept quiet.

Kirsten Stewart watched from the back corner, her vision lurking whilst her body remained immobile, her eyelids half closed as though she has lost sleep over the thought of Edward Cullen. Pale skin, a stare as though she has not drunken any blood beside that of a deer, she hid behind the young man in front of her whenever she caught me catching her staring at me as though my neck was her next victim. Her answer to my tutor's question, "any particular fiction books?" was as even as the part in her hair, one tone barely uttering the words "no, just fiction." I knew that she kept staring at me for the rest of the class without having to ever look back at her, in the event of her vampiric teeth surfacing from her gums as she smiled at me.

Last but not least, Sandra Bullock. She sat in my tutorial after Peter Griffin's lecture, and I kept looking around for Melissa McCarthy so that they could reenact a couple of scenes for me from The Heat. Melissa McCarthy was nowhere to be found, though, so when I asked Sandra Bullock to instead reenact a scene from Miss Congeniality, she threw her beauty pageant crown at my head and crossed her arms, frowning at me for the rest of the class. The side of her face, her jawline, her nose, her hair, her laugh that erupted from nowhere and bounced off the walls for minutes. The resemblance was simply astounding.

While I certainly enjoyed watching these celebrity lookalikes and conjured up hypothetical situations in my mind, I lost a great deal of attention that I could have paid my tutors and lecturers. Instead I invested my time in laughing at, while observing, celebrity lookalikes. I have you to blame, Hollywood, if my scores this semester take a plunge downhill.