Original Prompt

Bernard Cooper's "Burl's"

My parents usually lingered after the meal, nursing cups of coffee while I played with the beads of condensation on my glass of ice water, tasted Tabasco sauce, or twisted pieces of my paper napkin into mangled animals. One evening, annoyed with my restlessness, my father gave me a dime and asked me to buy him a Herald Examiner from the vending machine in front of the restaurant.  

Cooper’s essay begins in a restaurant setting. He uses this setting to subtly flesh his parents’ characters, as well as uses it as the source and occurrence of his main topic--gender identification. It is at Burl’s that he has his first brush with gender confusion, and it is there after that he begins questioning the roles and the binaries that he identifies with. Cooper fuses these gender identities with both his parents stark roles and his wavering one and as a result reveals more about their characters and their roles in relation to one another—their intimacies or the lack thereof than could be revealed through simple telling. The reader also focuses on the narrator’s struggle to fit into expected character. Cooper travels throughout the work, but his return to Burl’s places it as both the opening and closing of his work, contrasting the plastic and phony aspects of the restaurant to the phoniness of reality. Cooper questions what is real and where does gender begin to define? 

However, there is an interesting section in the beginning where Cooper focuses on tightness—holding tightly to the dime or paper, the tightness of the transvestite’s dresses. Cooper struggles to fit the world into two tight binaries, and in doing so, struggles with the open interpretation of the world around him. My challenge is to take a moment where you have felt tight, whether that was feeling like you were trapped in a tight, stressful situation or even wearing a pair of jeans that don’t fit quite right anymore, and then reflect on that tightness and attempt to tie it into some moment of discovery, or openness.