I'm A Girl In Progress Too.

My sister and I have a tradition that if we are both free on a Saturday or Friday night we will rent two movies out of the Redbox and watch them together. Our rules are that we will always get a comedy, and along with the comedy we will either get an action movie, or we will get a movie that looks absolutely terrible.

Last night was our tradition movie night, and we got a comedy The Five Year Engagement and we got a movie which we thought would be terrible Girl In Progress.

We had seen the previews for Girl in Progress before, and it looked like a pretty boring story so we figured we would get it. By the end of the movie we realized how completely wrong we were about our judgments on the movie.

The movie is a coming-of-age story about a teenage girl who is being raised by a young, single mother. This girl, Ann, resents her mother because she comes home late after drinking with her boyfriend ( a married man), this causes Ann to do all of the house work, and take care of her mother, because her mother doesn't take care of her.

Ann's teacher tells her class about a  "Coming- of-Age- story," and how it is one's journey through childhood into adulthood. Her teacher explains that's the protagonist of the story must go through his/her "Rites of Passages" on their way to adulthood. Ann is mislead and thinks that if she goes through these steps she can leave her mother and start her own life.

Therefore Ann begins her own coming-of-age story.

First she has to become identified as a good-girl, the kind who says "gosh darn-it!" and wears pigtails while riding on a pink bike with a basket. While she is the good girl she has to do something extra nerdy, so a teacher will recognize her intelligence, and watch as she throws it all away.

Second she has to start being seen with the wrong kind of people, she befriends the schools bad-girl. Ann begins drinking and doing gate-way drugs, she also starts disrespecting her mom, and skipping class. Ann also has to leave her best friend behind to fit in to her new crowd of friends.

Third, and possibly most important, Ann has to lose her virginity, and after that she gets on a bus to New York City and leaves her mother behind.

Now Ann succeeded in everything up to the third step, she did not sleep with the schools bad-boy, but he just tells everyone they did. So Ann loses her friendship with the bad-girl, and she has no one.
Ann quickly gets onto a bus to New York, but her mother stops her.

Ann learns her lesson that becoming an adult doesn't mean she has to leave her friends behind and lose her virginity, she learns that everyone has their own path to adulthood.

Now doesn't this make you wonder if maybe Ann had the right idea? Is there possibly a way to skip to adulthood by just going through a few simply, but bold steps?

I personally disagree, I don't think those steps are necessary, but I find it remarkable how this movie was able to dissect every teenage movie.

Anyways I just wanted to point out that we are all girls in progress. We are all going to leave friends behind at some points, and we are all going to make mistakes and when you sit around wondering why did you do those things, it's simply because it is all apart of you story, and how your story is leading you to become an independent person.