Cocoa Around New York example essay topic

"How Being in Love can Change People" In the three marvelous works, Matchstick Men, Punch-Drunk Love, and "Mama Day", people are all changed greatly, and for the better by romantic or father / child love. How everyone knows that there is no one on Earth who is perfect, yet when there is love, we come so close to it. Within these three works of art, one can analyze how there is actual change through people when there is love present. Cocoa states in Gloria Naylor's "Mama Day", "When I had come to New York seven years before that I had wondered about the need for such huge buildings.

No one ever seemed to be in them very long; everyone was out on the sidewalks moving, moving, moving- and to where?" Cocoa starts out as a lost cause, going to New York as a resident tourist. Meeting George saved her vision of New York... He knew what it was really about, "New York wasn't on those Manhattan sidewalks, just the New Yorkers. My city was a network of small towns, some even smaller than here in Willow springs. It could be one apartment building, a handful of blocks, a single square mile hidden off with its own language, newspapers and magazines- its own judge and juries. You'd never realize that because you went and lived on our fringes".

Cocoa was living in New York and had resided there for seven years, but was she seeing the real New York? Or was she seeing a New York fantasy world? ... A forever-tourist New York resident.

George insists that New York is much more than its' buildings or looks, it's the little things, "To live in New York you'd have to know about the florist on Jamaica Avenue who carried Yellow roses even though they didn't move well, but it was his dead wife's favorite color. The candy store in Harlem that wouldn't sell cigarettes to twelve year olds without notes from their mothers. That they killed chickens below Houston, prayed to Santa Barbara by the East River and in Benson hurst girls were still virgins when they married". One of the reasons why George offered to show Cocoa around New York was because she needed a "guide".

She had lived in New York for seven years and still had thought like a tourist, the same way of thinking she had had when she arrived seven years earlier. George did not want anything from Cocoa either, which might have scared her, "You just hadn't met a man who wanted absolutely nothing from you but honesty". The first change in Cocoa was her view on New York. She completely changed how she saw things. She wrote letters to Mama Day and in response to one of the letters, Mama Day said, "Baby girl was seeing New York with someone special".

Cocoa's next change was not calling people food. She had had a big problem by calling people "fudge-sticks, kumquats, bagels, zucchinis, cherry-vanilla and tacos". But as George and Cocoa's friendly affair continued around New York every weekend, Cocoa's bad habit stopped, and George was the first to notice, "you were learning the difference between a Chinese, a Korean, a Vietnamese, a Filipino, that Dominicans and Mexicans weren't all Puerto Ricans. You could finally pick out German Jews, Russian Jews, Hasid ies and Israelis". Not only was Ophelia changing, but George was changing too.

"I was so busing enjoying the change in you, I didn't notice it in myself. Sure I'd was any old pair of jeans stomping around the streets alone and the ones I met you in were freshly pressed. I'd gone into taking a moment over deciding which aftershave from two days of not shaving at all". George really cared about how he appeared to Ophelia.

George wanted to be at his best and Ophelia was becoming her best all because of how their changes in love brought them together, very similar to the 2002 film, Punch-Drunk Love, Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Barry Egan, played by Adam Sandler, falls in love with a British, Lena, the second he sees her. He's so shy he hides behind a wall from her. Most of Barry's rages, sadness, excessive emotion, come from his sisters' hassling him, and how he just puts up with them.

When he walked in the family party, his sisters bombarded him with: "Remember when we were little and we used to call Barry gay?"Hey Barry, remember when we called you gay-boy?"Are you still using that dandruff shampoo?"Did you know you have rice in your hair?"Come on gay boy its time to eat", and finally when he couldn't take it any more, he punched in the glass windows, and his sisters responded with, "What the fuck is your problem?"Fucking retard!" He just never stands up for himself to anyone and then takes it out with his rage. That all changes when he meets his Lena- she gives him power and strength to stand up to people and even to himself. When he has problems with the phone sex operator, and they come and crash his car, Barry draws strength from Lena's love. Barry finds the man in charge of the operation and goes to where he is and lets him know one thing, "I have a love in my life, it makes me stronger than anything you can imagine".

Before meeting Lena, he would definitely not have had the courage to confront him, but because Lena gives him strength he can. The love for Lena also gave Barry the power to overcome the fear Barry had for the hoodlums who were hired to hit Barry's car. After Barry's car was hit, he took charge and got out of his car and beat them up and had no fear, which is a big change from before he knew Lena's love. Love can also empower you for the better, just as in the 2003 film, Matchstick Men, directed by Ridley Scott. Nicholas Cage plays Roy Waller, a nervous, twitching con artist who sees a shrink. Everything changes when his long, lost "daughter" steps into the picture.

Roy slowly and painfully learns how to father Angela and Angela is even included in on a scam. Through Roy "fathering" Angela, he changes... he ends up loosing his nervous twitch and stutter. It is very obvious how with love, positive changes come. From Ophelia opening her narrow mind, Barry standing up to himself and others, to Roy losing his twitch. With love, having love, and being in love, expect change, good changes, because they are always present.