S T U D E N T S P O T L I G H T:
Molly McKenna ‘21 Her Valedictorian speech delivered to Class of 2021
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(From June 6, 2021) Good afternoon, Mrs. Burek, Mrs. Corvo, Sisters of Charity, members of the Board of Trustees, administration, Ms. Deehan, faculty, parents, grandparents and guests. I don’t know if any of you have been to an art museum lately, but if you ever have or ever will, I think there’s always a certain humanity to the antiquities department. It’s a very unique experience to stand in a room of sculpted figures from 2000 years ago, and it won’t take you long to notice a certain theme of the work—the Greeks sculpted perfection. What you’ll see is strong, heroic men and soft, virginal 18
LEGACY Magazine | WINTER 2022
women, and not much else. The Greeks believed, and I’m generalizing here for the purpose of brevity, that, somewhere out there, there was such a thing as a perfect human being, that there were mathematical proportions which denoted the ideal figure. This idea of mathematical perfection persisted. You can see it in the works of da Vinci during the Renaissance and, in a way, you can see it today. Essentially every culture on earth has had their own ideas of perfection. Rococo women painted their faces with leadbased makeup to achieve pale skin. Ancient Mayans used wooden boards to permanently alter a newborn infant’s soft
skull. For a thousand years, aristocratic Chinese women broke and bound the feet of their young daughters to achieve a three-inch foot. In the digital age, it’s so much easier than ever before to be exposed to our own culture’s ideals. We watch makeup tutorials from influencers with thousands of dollars of cosmetic surgery, skincare, cameras, and lighting, and we ask ourselves why our makeup never looks as good as theirs. We see photoshopped bikini pictures from celebrities with personal trainers and private chefs, and ask ourselves why our bodies don’t look like theirs. We make idols out of people and worship manufactured versions of
