Plot

Twenty-five year old Diana believes image is everything. She only works one day a week, as an esthetician, earning only $9,000 a year. As such, she relies on others to fund her lavish lifestyle, her boyfriend Tino taking the brunt of it. He pays for all their dates, as well as puts gas in her car and buys all her cigarettes. She wants Tino to buy a house, she not putting anything into that purchase at all. She also is training Tino into believing that he should buy her an engagement ring worth one year of his salary. In addition, she got her parents to buy her a car which she has yet to pay them back for, to pay for her esthetician training, and to build her a home spa office which she has not done anything with yet in terms of having clients there. She wants the world to believe she has it all. She is $42,000 in debt, including what she owes her parents. Gail wants to snap Sarah into a sense of reality both about what she can afford on her income, and what it will take if she were to spend on the big purchases that she wants, such as the ring and the house. Gail in part gives Diana a symbolic challenge to get the point of unrealistic expectations across to her. And since Diana believes image is everything, Gail gets her to guess what a series of people do and have in terms of monetary wealth based solely on their appearance.—Huggo