Cailin Iverson
ENGL 102 – Tuesdays & Thursdays
Essay 4
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Drinking to be Entertained or Drinking to be Entertaining? In Sacha Z. Scoblic’s essay, Rock Star, Meet Teetotaler, she recounts her societal struggles after coming out from troubles involving alcoholism. At the age of thirty-two, she had been a Teetotaler for six months and was meeting people at a restaurant in hopes of finding friends to be acquainted with her new found sobriety. However, when she declines an offer of wine, she displays conflict between her drinking and non-drinking self because she once conceived that entertainment could only be met through the consumption of alcohol. She portrays a desire for social acceptance, yearning to be fun and exciting so that she could be seen as easy to get along with, but feels uncomfortable in being so without intoxication. With no idea how to be fun without drinking, she realized that her drunken personality was not her actual one, and writes about her quest for searching identity. Displaying fear that her new found sobriety would cause her to stick out in society as awkward and mundane, Sacha admits to have been through a tough change of social lifestyle. A story of personal experience, it is clear that Scoblic wrote this essay in order to enlighten alcoholics and drinkers as a whole by convincing them that they could be both entertaining and entertained without the use of liquor. She does this through the use of informal style, yet sophisticated diction, as well as assertive writing in order to bring out sympathy and understanding from the readers that are able to relate to her experiences. Scoblic’s essay is a story about her change and recovery from alcoholism, narrating with her own thoughts and feelings. This idea in itself already gives a suggestion of informality because the essay is becomes very personal and open. Most others would be ashamed to have once been addicted to alcohol, yet Scoblic desired to share