The World According To Crystal

Some of the students in the first class at Charlotte Community School for Girls.

How’s your breakfast? I’m having blueberries, Greek yogurt, walnuts, pecans and flax seed with a little local honey drizzled on top. And coffee.

Breakfast rocks. Most important meal and all that. I want to talk about breakfast some more, but first I want to tell about someone in Charlotte who is doing something special.

I met Cathy Sheafor about a year ago at Story Slam when she laid out her vision for Charlotte Community School for Girls, an experiential learning center for 5th- through 8th-graders. A select group of girls from low-income families would be invited to attend the year-round school, and they would be “challenged to dream, plan, and transform dreams into realities.” (Click here to read a recent piece in The Charlotte Observer!)

The school opens in mid-August in SouthEnd. You must visit and have Cathy tell you about it – I really can’t do it justice – but I so believe in the school that I joined the Board of Advisors.

During our last meeting, the board learned that because fund-raising wasn’t going as well as expected some things had to be cut back. The school wouldn’t be able to provide the girls with a good breakfast when they arrive at 7:30 a.m.

“Those babies have to have breakfast,” I whispered to a fellow board member. I had just finished watching Jamie Oliver’s “Food Revolution.”

I put out feelers to some very special people including Chef Geoffrey Blount, who heads up the Baking and Pastry Arts program for Central Piedmont Community College Culinary School.

Chef Blount called back and has rounded up a dream team of chefs, instructors, culinary students, farmers, vendors and more who will work with the school on a long-term plan for breakfast and lunch.

In the short term, though, the girls still need a good breakfast.

I asked Cathy to create The Breakfast Fund to get them through the first year. It’s $40 a day or $800 a month to get students and the staff started with a healthy meal. I personally am covering September.

Now, I want to challenge you to pay for a month. Or a week. Or a day. Think of it as investing in the community’s future. Can’t afford it by yourself? Share the cost with a group of girlfriends, your book club, your church group, your sorority sisters, your running buddies.

And if you can’t give money right now, please visit the school or click here for other volunteer and donation opportunities.

Investments and the future dominated my brain last week.

I met with a financial planner to roll over my 401K and with an accountant to get things rolling for From The Hip Communications, my new biz.

If you know me at all, you know that I hate dealing with money unless I’m giving to charity.

The most important investment I made last week, though, was to a girl I haven’t even met yet. All I know is that she will graduate in 2015.

I made a six-year pledge to Circle de Luz, a giving circle that helps Latinas get through a vulnerable time in their life: 7th grade through high school graduation.

Here’s the group’s mission statement:

Circle De Luz radically empowers young Latinas by supporting and inspiring them in the pursuit of their possibilities through extensive mentoring, programming, and scholarship funds for further education.

“Radically empowers” sealed the deal for me.

Rosie Molinary, my dear friend and fellow fierce woman, created the circle after the 2007 tour for her book, Hijas Americanas: Beauty, Body Image, and Growing Up Latina. Rosie was asked repeatedly:  “But what I can I do to help?”

I joined because the young women in Circle de Luz’s Class of 2015 may become doctors, lawyers, teachers, mothers, nurses, journalists, artists, etc.  And they might be inspired to create giving circles to help others.

Call it paying it forward. Call it investing. I call it money well spent.

I’m a huge fan of “Friday Night Lights.” It’s one of best shows on TV. It’s in my Top 20 best series ever. If you’ve never watched “FNL,” all three seasons are on Hulu.com.

One of my characters is Tyra. Her mom goes through guys like packs of Marlboro Lights. Her daddy left when she was a baby. Her sister is a stripper.

When the show started, Tyra was the Queen of Low Self Esteem. She partied. She screwed around. Her grades sucked. She was beautiful and smart but had no sense of worth or self respect.

She was sexually assaulted, helped get rid of the body of the bastard who attacked her, flunked classes, dated the sexy bad boy, fell for a good guy, stomped all over the good guy’s heart, ran away with a rodeo stud, etc.

Her story arc in the last three seasons fascinated me (except for that whole murder thing).  For every step forward, she took two or three or four back. She ran for class president and used her sister’s stripper pals for a rally. And she won. Then she bailed with the rodeo stud. Yet she came back.

Why? Because Tyra had people who believed in her: friends and a guidance counselor.

Tyra finally realized her worth and her power in the finale. She had to write her college entry essay. Landry, the good guy with the broken heart, told her that her first draft didn’t work (He called it a “five-page needlepoint pillow”). He kept pushing her to do better (“dig deeper, and fastly”). He urged her to talk about why she wanted to go to college and what changed her life in the last two years.

The whole episode rocked but I wanted to put the essay up because it’s poetic (looking for the author…so he/she can be credited… it may be the work of Jason Katims… I’ve loved him since “My So-Called Life”). Go back to top and watch the clip. But if you’re like me, you’ll want to have the words, too. Here ya go:

“Two years ago, I was afraid of wanting anything.
I figured wanting would lead to trying and trying would lead to failure.