Don't Always Judge a Book by It's Cover

Britain Got Talent - Susan Boyle

I can't embed this video so please click on the link of Susan Boyle and listen to her. I love this video. This older woman - not very attractive, but nicely dressed walks onto the stage of the "Britains Got Talent" show and the crowd immediately begins to laugh. The judges roll their eyes and can barely keep a strait face as they interview her. She is not beautiful and she is older and everyone has it set in their minds that she is going to be ridiculous. As she begins her song the judges chins drop and the entire audience boisterously begins to cheer and applaud this woman as she sings. She is fantastic. The moment is fantastic, made even more so by the fact that she isn't beautiful and no longer young.

I was walking my 4 year old son home from preschool a few weeks ago. We don't live far from the school and I walk him everyday, but sometimes when I walk a car with a group of teenage boys will drive by and yell something out the window at me. This time they yelled "It's not working" and drove off. I wasn't sure exactly what this was supposed to mean, but since I recognized these boys as the ones who had yelled rude things about my weight before when I was walking, I took it to mean that the walking wasn't working because I was still fat. When I was in junior high I was overweight and comments like these were a common occurrence as I walked down the road or through the halls of my junior high. I suppose the boys in the car have made comments that were much ruder on previous occasions, but this time what they said really bothered me. It cut deeper than just telling me I was fat. These boys wanted to make me believe that losing the weight was hopeless and that I should just give up. I know these are just jerks and the I should ignore them , but - who do these boys think they are? They don't know anything about me. Why do I have to endure this as a grownup woman. My weight problem has not kept me from having a good life and finding a nice husband who loves me. What I also want to know is - why is it that when an attractive person attempts to do something everyone expects them to do well - they even root for them and hope that they do well, but when an overweight person or unattractive person makes the same attempt - we automatically expect them to be horrible?
I do it too.

One last observation - Did anyone else notice Simon sigh like a love sick school boy as he watched Susan Boyle sing?