To Have Danced with American Aristocrats: The Untold Story Behind the Bernie Sanders Political Revolution

By Olive Vinci

The American Political machine chugs along ran on blatant corruption, but an unheard-of senator, Bernie Sanders, rose to fame with an unlikely campaign funded only by the American people. The idea came amidst an insomniac induced nervous breakdown while I was beyond fed up of playing the game, as a Millennial, to achieve the American Dream.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Dec 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781665750202

Olive Vinci

“Olive Vinci” worked in social services in Flint and Detroit, Michigan. She became involved in the Democratic Party in 2008. She joined the US Navy as a firefighter in 2009 with the ambition to become a civil rights attorney. In 2015 she dropped out of Tulane University’s Master of Social Work program and had an insomniac induced nervous breakdown. She started a “Political Revolution” with the hopes to take back democracy for the American people that has a government funded by the people that serves the people. She went on to work at Bernie Sander’s Presidential Headquarters but had to quit due to debilitating insomnia that causes functional impairment.

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Copyright © 2023 Olive Vinci.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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ISBN: 978-1-6657-5019-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-5021-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-5020-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023917706

Archway Publishing rev. date: 12/15/2023

CONTENTS

Introduction

Life in the Village

Detroit is Where the Heart Is

The Wild World of Poli-trick-ing

Let the Post Cards Begin

Flashback to Disney: The Most Magical Place on Earth!

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Law School Tuition or the Military

In the Navy!

The USS Abraham Lincoln

Home On Leave

Navy: Buck Up for Round Two

Willoughby Spit

Trapped In Norfolk

Three is a Crowd

Tulane

Insanely Woke

Ferocious Beast State of Mind

A Political Revolution, Please

How To Save a Life

Insane in the U.S.A.

Back to Puerto Rico

Back in Waabigwan Sedated and Humiliated

Honored to Work for Bernie Sanders

About the Author

This book is

dedicated to my mother, who is battling stage four cancer right now. You are my rock and I love you. You were the first person I went to with this latest insane idea, to write a book, and you have encouraged me and stood by my side my whole life, with all of my insane ideas. Thank you mom, for teaching me compassion at a very young age and I am sorry for what I’ve put you through.

I would like to thank my editor, Brooke C. Stoddard, for his editorial assistance and unwavering nonjudgmental support and encouragement.

INTRODUCTION

I recently read an interview from one of the first memoirists, an American by the name of Susanna Kaysen, the author of Girl Interrupted, and she described books as being an artifact of sorts. A close look under the microscope, for a moment in time, in human history. How was it to live in a certain time period, in a certain Empire.

To say the society in which we live feels extremely surreal is my personal offering, shared by many fellow American citizens. There is a numbness that takes over. We are used to this. The school shootings. The total mistrust. And the cruelness. The cruelness for me will always be shocking. The total. Lack. Of. Empathy. that just becomes the norm. I don’t know if it was always this way, it seems as if it were a vine that slowly crept up a tall, once proud and healthy tree. And the vine took over the life of the tree completely. The tree begins to die, but its death isn’t imminent; it’s slower, it’s insidious and more painful. It’s contradictory, because it’s insidious yet it’s right in our faces, seemingly all the time. But it’s pushed into the backdrop of our everyday lives.

It’s interesting. Almost as if it were all by design.

Most people refuse to watch the news in America anymore. On the other extreme, some become news junkie recluses, whose entire world revolves around nothing but the emotional rollercoaster ride of following these narcissistic sociopaths at the helm of our destruction. It becomes an obsession. And nothing is real anymore. Nothing is trusted. If polled, I would bet nine out of ten Americans refuse to watch the news here. Just to stay sane.

That’s a bit dystopian, if you really stop staring mindlessly at screens (TV, laptop, iPhone with blurbs and quick streams of flashing videos and photos) long enough to let the thought simmer. Dystopian. My country has become dystopian. It’s extremely interesting really, once you get past any sadness or rage.

The tree is our country, the vine is corruption. The country is the United States of America.

It is not as if I had an epiphany, an I’m feeling cute, let’s start a political revolution type of aha! moment, while I’m posting adorable half-naked pictures on syrupy, smiley, highly addictive social media, garnishing thousands of likes. It would have been better that way, but about as real as Fakebook and Instagram truly are. No, unfortunately, it was raw and real. So real it was terrifying. But I did do it, I tried to cut down that vine. Me, nobody. A bottom-of-the-barrel, subservient girl unraveling and wildly spinning out of control.

I can’t do this anymore! I screamed on the phone, I can’t do this I couldn’t mindlessly chug along within the system. I was screaming, and begging, and slamming wine out of a bottle still in a paper bag overlooking the City of Detroit.

Can’t do what? V had asked, calmly. He actually did do it for me. It was just my idea. The entire setup.

America! I can not do this anymore. I can’t. I’m losing my shit completely. I have to get the fuck out of here. I have to go away. Just get away . . . out of it for a while! Fuck! I don’t even have a passport… I have to get the fuck out of here…

Although I’ve never read the book Welcome to the Monkeyhouse by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a quote from it sticks beneath my skin on a bone slightly beneath my brain: In an insane world, a sane man must appear insane. The political revolution wasn’t me, with fake breasts and a pompous, fake, rubber ass, holding a Pepsi can for corporate America singing, Kumbaya and holding hands in between the police and the black families grieving the death of another life lost to police brutality; it was me trashing a politician staffer’s house. Me in jail SCREAMING. Me making thousands of phone calls, wild eyed, "on drugs" they said, disgusted. Me trying to save the life of someone I loved so much that I became delusional in order to cope with the reality of America I had come home to from another endless war.

Amid our very own manmade opioid epidemic, stemmed by one hundred percent, unadulterated greed coupled with government corruption, which killed half a million people, I tried to save one life. Just one. That destroyed me even more. Most people didn’t care. If it didn’t directly affect them, why would they? I was on the ground with even more skin in the game now, an insomniac. A complete lunatic. The fortunate ones were on TV, lounging in cashmere sweaters and dripping in diamonds. Some didn’t look human even, with lips blown up with injections that became freakishly bulbous. I was on the ground, driving across America, and trailblazing like a madwoman. It was not glamorous at all. It was grotesque.

I was living out of my Volkswagen Passat, with my military-issued, green canvas sea bag, full of everything I owned. The revolution was not televised. And it is not over. I hope that although the fire has been put out the best it could, the embers can be stoked again, with copious amounts of gasoline added this time.

There were always signs. Little blurbs and hiccups in this life, as you emerged from childhood, that something was totally and utterly wrong. That human life wasn’t valued. Health wasn’t valued. Happiness. But it was always put back on the individual that one simply did not deserve these things. And it was always dangled in front of our faces: if you just worked harder and got smarter then you too could achieve the American dream. Just don’t become one of the unlucky ones, I suppose. Don’t make the wrong mistakes and don’t be born in the wrong family, or the wrong neighborhood either because that will set you back all the way.

What I feel is so strange to me, now that I have a child, is the openly unfiltered and raw distrust. It is compounded with a system of unchecked and unregulated capitalism, gone completely wild, that is a boot on the back of a society’s neck. And we can only ask ourselves: Are we truly happy with this? Do we continue to buy into this dream, or, more so now, the burning question of how we get off the train that seems full speed ahead, with no slowing down, into our demise? The blatant government corruption is so alarming you can feel it on your skin. I wonder if it weighs on other shoulders causing tension around the neck. There seems to be nothing we can do about it, and so maybe make a chiropractor appointment in between staring mindlessly at a computer at a detested job for eight hours a day and ignoring family while staring at Facebook, TikTok or Instagram on the latest iPhone for the other eight. The society itself feels so ill. My son is one year old and if we don’t find a way out, he will have to start doing school shooter drills in kindergarten. When he is FIVE YEARS OLD. At the alarmingly rapid acceleration of such a cancer, I feel I will send him to Kindergarten, in America, with a bulletproof vest of sorts on. A smiley, smiley, happy, happy Mickey Mouse bulletproof backpack vest.

What if the rage subconsciously burrows deeper in each one of us but we carry on mindlessly accepting it all? Maybe for the elderly, they are old and will not live to see our country continue to rapidly rot, so they shrug their shoulders dismissively at it.

I know I am not alone in these thoughts.

I am not alone, because here you are, still following along. And there was a revolution. My ten-minute conversation, before I descended further into madness, came to fruition, to cut down the vine of corruption, and it blew up beautifully, like the grand finale fireworks at a celebration of true American freedom. Freedom from the boot on the neck of disgusting and despicable blatant government corruption and corporate control.

I wanted to live in a legitimate democracy. We live in an oligarchy instead. America is not a democracy.

I used to think I was the only one who was left behind or just totally mangled in the mind, beyond recognition. I did snap, you see. An epic breakdown of sorts, the kind that leaves you behind to lick your wounds alone and hide, shaken and afraid. It was a nasty breakdown with bursts of beauty and euphoria. A stripping away of it all.

I was removed from it all. The jobs, the family, social media and came back in awe of what had happened since I’d been gone. I opened the door back up and the stench was even more profound! Donald Trump was our president! Insane! A shocking and disgusting spectacle of a young country gone awry for all the world to marvel at, perplexed. The stench of a rotting society. In the scheme of things, I sense this is just the beginning. Because no one knows what to do to get us off this train, and so it seems we are eating our fears… drinking away the pain… if not masking with other drugs whether or not they are legal, like the marijuana dispensaries on every corner or the random pills that come in the mail from the Department of Veterans Affairs… the intensity of all that is going on around us is something I can physically feel. Other people feel it too, it makes us very anxious. It’s a darkness and hopelessness that surrounds us with no consensus resolution in sight. The greed that swallows us. The chaos and division that the one percent creates, festers and boils, whether we turn off the news or not, it seeps in. It does seep in.

The one percent: what an asinine term for them. It feeds into their narcissism of lacking total empathy or apathy and exploiting people, with no remorse, for their personal gain. They can not be real human beings with real human emotions. They feed like vampires, sucking the blood and marrow of our society, until it becomes a dry, lifeless corpse. In a fascinating sense, they seem to have no souls or consciousness.

To hoard so much wealth and prefer to blast off into space and leave humanity behind to rot, is so amazingly soulless. Their greed is a sickness most humans down below cannot wrap their consciousness around.

We still have time for an unlikely hero. I still have a glimpse of hope. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be writing this right now. You do, too, or you wouldn’t be following along.

This is my secret I’ve kept for seven years. I hope it is of some use. I started a political revolution. It was my idea. V, as I had nicknamed him, took the idea and turned it into a reality. He did it because perhaps he loved me but more so because I was his highly unlikely friend.

LIFE IN THE

VILLAGE

I grew up in a small farming community in the smack dab middle of Michigan. A small town where people left their doors unlocked at night, known for their state champion football team and an amphitheater near the river that hosted a weeklong event of summer concerts every year. On the outside looking in, my family was quintessentially an average working-class family, living the American dream. My father worked at a tractor supply company 40 hours a week then came home, ate his dinner, and returned to settle on his concrete, cold, hard shed floor to continue working until dark, as a small engine mechanic. He fixed lawnmowers in the spring and summer months, snowmobiles and snowblowers in the long winter ones, tossing in chainsaws and four-wheelers, things like that. My mother worked odd jobs but primarily cleaned houses.

I first moved to Detroit in June of 2008, a month after graduating from Saginaw Valley State University. It was a crazy time in Detroit’s history, but things had been beyond bleak for a while. I worked as hard as I could to get through college. To go was a dream for me and pushed hard by our teachers but something unfamiliar to my parents, that they were wary of from the beginning. It was expensive, and they were correct in their questioning if it would be worth it in the end. It was a prestige of some sort, a status symbol, to be educated. They wanted me to get a job out of high school until I knew what I was even going to college for, but out of pride and ignorance, I refused. I was adamant to go, like the vast majority of my high school graduating class. To offset the tuition, I worked two jobs throughout, mainly waiting tables and bartending, while picking up seasonal jobs such as working at a greenhouse in the summer, or retail during Christmas. My mother helped pay for my tuition by scrubbing toilets or working at a minimum wage factory job. One summer we had a garage sale to buy my books. I was always undecided what I wanted to be and my parents discouraged a lot of my choices. I changed my major at least five times and it took me six years to graduate. To this day I wonder what would have happened if I had gotten a degree in teaching. There are so many decisions in life, that one reflects on, thinking everything would be so different if I would have made just one different choice. If I would have never left my small town, would my life be much better than it is now?

While at Saginaw Valley State University, I took a year off to build my resume, because the job market was extremely competitive then. Not only did you have to have the degree, when applying, but they also wanted professional experience. I did a domestic peace corps stint, with the American Red Cross, which paid for my last year of college. This was my first government job, which paid below the minimum wage, yet paid for the tuition for my last year of college. I often have nightmares that I am trapped in college and can’t get out. Some nightmares of it are just this panicky shame of never graduating. In the end though, my degree was a hodgepodge of various classes I took and what shook out. A bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in English Literature. I loved the social sciences. I loved sociology the most. Before my final semester, I bawled hysterically, in the Dean’s office because I thought I was finally about to graduate, but going over my transcripts, found out I had to stay one more semester. I lived at home with my parents most of the time, to save money on tuition and commuted an hour back and forth to Saginaw, one of the nearest mid-size cities, to work on my degree. College was very stressful. I was trying to survive it with as minimal amount of debt as possible. I very proudly graduated with only $7,000 in student loans. It was really hard.

If I lived in a better country, it wouldn’t have been so hard.

I was at a family holiday party on my dad’s side, and exclaimed, I am the first to graduate college! I’ve paved the way for everybody else! I never got to walk at the ceremony, even. I was working that day, and my parents had kicked me out my last semester so no one would have shown up to see me in my cap and gown.

Well, it took you long enough, my Aunt Helen said snottily, six years! Didn’t it?

I was shocked, but I did feel ashamed I didn’t do it in the standard four.

"I only have $7,000 of debt though, I said, It’s hard! It’s expensive! You try it. Work two jobs and work days and nights to try to pay your way through and see how easy it is for you," I told her with an eyeroll.

Don’t forget, I helped you as much as I could, my mom added sharply.

You did help me. Thank you, mom. You did help me, I said, nodding my head. My original pride of graduating had resigned.

Maybe I was bragging too much or too proud. I felt like I deserved a congratulations. It was pretty brutal.

One of the best jobs I had, among many, making my way through, was working at a very dive bar in a small town that didn’t make most maps. The town co-existed next to my tiny village and consisted of two bars, one church, a post office and a gas station doubled as a party store. It was known for the annual tractor pull. A weeklong festival that boasted a large pavilion with bands and lots of beer. I grew up going to the tractor pull, because my dad and his friends would camp out there for a week and compete in competitions with their tractors. Best show. Who could pull the most weight. There was even a competition with little peddle tractors for the kids. This either very muddy or very dusty (depending on the weather) event always fell on the week of my birthday. I had $20 in birthday money and walked around the camper vendors, in a cyclone of dirt, with my buck teeth sticking out, picking out my birthday present. One year, I got an outrageous purple cowgirl hat decorated wildly with purple feathers. There was a woman who sold beautifully brilliant big amethyst rocks, they were purple too, and sparkled in the hot sun. I wanted one so bad. I’d stand admiring them far too long, chatting her up annoyingly, but could never afford one. They were beautiful to admire though.

There were handmade county fair type games we played, with makeshift spinning wheels and toss the ring on the bottles sort of thing, where we could win gold fish. Once we accumulated far too many gold fish we could trade them in for a rabbit. The neighbor girl I grew up across the road from, whose family were farmers, and I pooled our money together and won a black and white rabbit we named Friendship. For Friendship’s home we spray-painted a plastic mailbox, used specifically for newspapers, over and over in her driveway and later suspected the fumes and layers of spray paint led to Friendship’s early death. The neighbors became enmeshed with us, I still know all of the family’s birthdays by heart. The neighbor girl’s older brother still feels like my other brother, and my brother is like hers too. This is the way life is in a village sometimes.

Hinkley is where I began my bartending career of sorts. First at the Fun Filled Tavern working for my friend April’s dad. A hideously freaky childhood during which I had teeth that looked like novelty prank hillbilly teeth, crooked and protruding out of my lips was finally over -- thanks to braces, I became a pretty young lady, with my mother’s doe-like, large brown eyes and long, dark hair. My stature took after my dad’s side of the family and I was constantly told I looked like my fun Aunt Tina, my favorite aunt who had an affinity for boxed wine and Menthol cigarettes, and who I adored. My grandmother on my dad’s side was mysteriously brown, which I noticed as a child, and my aunts would have tanning competitions during the summer to see who could get the darkest. My mother used to say she could watch me tan, in minutes, and so in the winter I was white. In the summer and fall I turned ethnically questionable various shades of brown.

I bartended at a rather rough bar in Hinkley, but I loved the autonomy. I didn’t have to work with anyone or split my tips, and the owner really wanted nothing to do with the bar. It was his deceased wife’s dream to own a bar and he worked at General Motors, one of the most coveted jobs a working-class person could have in Michigan. General Motors was a proud career that touted one of the best unions in the nation. A person back then could graduate high school and go on to have a lucrative career making cars on the assembly line. His wife could stay home with the children, in a nice size home no less and they always had nice American made cars. Usually new ones! And family vacations… and pools… they could really live the American dream back then. When someone said their dad worked at GM, where I was from that meant their family had money. Nobody drove a foreign car in my small town. That would be a slap in the face to people’s livelihood. Michigan was all about the auto industry and the factories set up in Flint and Detroit. Flint and Detroit used to be idyllic American cities; they were prosperous and set the bar for the highest standard of living in America. By the time I hit Detroit after college graduation, I saw how far Detroit had fallen. When the factories packed up and left for cheaper labor in Mexico, the majority of the people who worked in them left as well.

Rats took over the city of Flint. Headlines talked about total rat infestation. Here is the American Dream for Flint; poof now it’s gone. Now it’s just gone because of political deals and greedy business decisions that were made, the major cities in my state were wiped out.

In my state of Michigan most of the big cities turned somewhat, if not completely, third world. Both made international headlines for how hard they had fallen from grace, Flint with its poisoned lead water and Detroit became sort of a terrifying spectacle, where artists came from all over the world to photograph its demise. Ruin porn, they called it. We came to see the fall of capitalism others admonished. Pictures of the abandoned buildings looking like bombs had been dropped all around us. The graffiti and trees and vines weaving inside and out, cracked wide-opened concrete. The schools with desks left chaotically intact, just abandoned. Just left to rot. Offices had filing cabinets with hard, plastic binders, strange paperwork left behind, I’d later try to study, to solve the question, "What the fuck happened?"

The best money I ever made in my life was at The Gambler’s Bar in Hinkley. Smoking was allowed inside at the time and so I always reeked like an ashtray when I got home. On slower shifts, I’d wash the nicotine off the walls in awe of watching the yellow melt down into eventual eggshell. I played my favorite songs on the jukebox and saw my fair share of alcoholism. My dad’s friend who he played softball with was a narcotics officer. One time I saw him at my Aunt Tina’s house. He knew that my hours at the bar had changed and recited my former schedule back to me, which I was stunned at, because I never once saw him in the bar. I asked him how he knew I switched my work schedule and he said he had been staking out the bar from a van nearby, because some of my clientele had been involved in a meth operation. They sat at the bar and would wait and watch the grain elevators across the road. Grain elevators are large silos used to store the farmers’ corn or wheat in until it’s picked up and taken to sell. Apparently, there was a chemical also stored there that was used to make meth. I will never forget that working at this bar was the best money I ever made. My boyfriend at the time, Joey, hated that I worked there and couldn’t believe my parents allowed it. I reiterated that he wasn’t paying for my college. And that was the big goal to get out of that bar, was college. My ticket to a new life; you know? On slow nights, when there wasn’t ruckus, fights to break up or people who had too much and had to be cut off, climbing up on the bar and threatening to beat my ass or tear up the place, I sat at the end on a stool, with my books and studied. Some bartenders were there for life, but not me.

I want to do something meaningful, I’d always say.

What in the hell does that even mean, ‘meaningful’? my dad asked, Is cleaning houses ‘meaningful?’ Is fixing lawn mowers ‘meaningful’? What the hell does meaningful even mean? he demanded one day.

I don’t know… I said wistfully, just… meaningful… like help people. I want to make things better for people… just… meaningful… that’s all…

I always wanted to know what else was out there, even as a child. The day after closing the bar, I’d be in an early math class passed out on my book, with a puddle of drool ebbing from my mouth. It was sometimes hard, to make a schedule with the classes needed, and getting home from closing the bar at 3AM. I liked my boss who said when I was there it was my bar. He was so hands off and was only upset when I accidentally set off the alarm one time while closing. That’s how I mostly paid my way through college. The various jobs and the hour commute there and back, along with the day and night shifts.

After six years, I graduated! Finally! My resume had begun to be built along the way. I had worked at a foster home that took in girls from Flint my last year, and that also had maybe a feeling of danger to it. I have no idea how the resume got on the director’s desk but I was always bouncing from job to job and there I was in an interview not knowing how the man got my resume. I had been substitute-teaching in Saginaw County but the pay was so low. One day I might land in my hometown. On those days subbing was a cake walk. The kids were scared their teacher might get a bad report from the sub. They kept their heads down and worked on assignment so quietly, the day was rather boring. Other days I might end up on the West side of Saginaw which were some of the roughest days of survival of my life. When I asked about a lesson plan, one teacher told me the plan was to keep all the second graders alive. And it truly was! Chaos ensued in the inner-city class rooms, where the school had prison-like gates that mechanically opened like an accordion and locked aggressively at the end of each hall. It was extremely hard to keep any sort of control over the classrooms. Once the principal called me in, desperately, because an elderly sub walked out mid-day.

The worst day was in a second-grade classroom. The students raided a supply closet and had a free-for-all. Once I regained control and had them sitting at their desks working on their assignments, a young Latino boy reached in his back pocket for one of the handful of pencils he had meticulously sharpened to a needle point and lunged across the desk in an attempt to stab another boy. I stood behind him, and grabbed him by the back of his shirt. I had an overwhelming fear that if I hadn’t had been right behind him, he would have succeeded and stabbed his peer in the throat. I was down on my hands and knees asking him, exasperated, why he would do such a thing. He kept shaking his head robotically and denying the entire incident. It was maddening.

Owing to my substitute-teaching inner-city experience, I landed a job at a medium-risk juvenile home. It was for juveniles who for whatever reason could not live with a foster family and was run by Holy Cross Childrens Services in a small unassuming town near the village I grew up in. The director knew I was country, a little small-town Podunk girl, so he questioned whether I could survive the job or get eaten alive by the residents, who were mostly from Flint. Because I had substitute-taught in the rough neighborhood of Saginaw, he gave me a chance. On my first day, the staff and students thought – on account of my looking so young – that I was a new foster care resident myself.

This job had elements of intrigue, shock and danger. I came to admire a black girl my age who grew up in Flint and was also working on her degree in social work, although we were wary of each other at first. Her name was Sapphire Cell. She was a model and a single mother. She was tall and so was I. She was six foot with elongated slender arms and deep tar-black skin. She was good at the job; she’d been there for a while, and somewhat of a controversial celebrity among the adolescent girls.

Are you a model, like Miss Cell? juvenile residents asked me.

No, I am a rock star, I’d reply, sarcastically. And to them, maybe I was. For the juvenile residents, Sapphire and I were two of the very few connections to the outside – although the group home looked like any other ranch style home in rural America, it acted for its residents more like a prison. Many were much too traumatized. Many could simply not grasp any resemblance to normality. And so they idolized us. They would notice peculiar changes my boyfriend wouldn’t notice such as I had gotten new shoes, got a haircut or had painted my nails. They thought I looked like the movie star from The Princess Diaries, Ann Hathaway, which was the biggest compliment.

They, on the other hand, had experienced some of the most gut-wrenching and heart-breaking abuse. One girl’s father had sex with her since she could remember. Shawna had discussed it nonchalantly at school to a friend -- in enough detail to get the state involved. The father went to prison and she was eventually removed from her mother when her mother started sending pictures of the young pre-teen in lingerie and the father, in prison, would mail back vials of sperm. Shawna was one of my favorites. She still had an innocence about her and a people-pleasing sweetness. She was my biggest fan and I’d often bring her little gifts, like a journal where I’d try to muster an inspirational or encouraging message to her to help her get through the week.

I was part-time/on-call staff working both day and night shifts, and one time when I was home I got a call. They had taken the girls to church and a riot of some sort had broken out. Shawna had an altercation with the police. The sweetest girl. She had blacked out and attacked a cop car. It took two cops to get her off the car and they threw her down violently and she had hit her head on the pavement.

My favorite girl. My heart.

I nervously went to pick up Shawna at the hospital. She was her usual sweet, cheery self.

Miss Vinci! she exclaimed, surprised and happy to see me. What are you doing here? I asked her if she had eaten anything and if she were hungry. The food at the group home was rather a mix between hospital and jail food, sort of a slop of frozen tasteless offerings or bulk canned goods that were opened and warmed. Usually, most of the girls smothered everything in cheap hot sauce.

I liked to do simple acts of kindness for them; this often meant something special to them and sometimes it was stunning how overwhelmed they would be with gratitude -- as in the instance when I bought Shawna some McDonalds food after the church riot and hospital pick up. My heart went out to them and maybe I loved them too much. The director told me that maybe I was a bit out of my element working there. I was always the good cop, the one always wanting to make their lives better in any way possible. After all, they were children with an extremely unfair fate. After the church riot, I proposed to the director that I throw a pizza and pool party for all those who did not participate, and she agreed. We held the party in our house, which was nothing special, just a mid-size farm-house my parents had rehabbed with an above ground pool. One of the juveniles, a girl who had come up from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and was abandoned enjoyed it the most. She sat on our living room chair as if she was in a royal palace, in awe, and kept exclaiming, Miss Vinci! This is your house, Miss Vinci? It is soooo niiiice! It is sooooo clean! You are so lucky, Miss Vinci! You have a pool? Wow, thank you so much Miss Vinci. This is sooooo nice!

Working there I was constantly shocked. I was shocked thinking about being sheltered in my working class, middle class white life. And I was shocked at the multitude of realities for kids in America. A lot of the little money I made at the group home went back into the group home trying to create as nice of a world as I could for the girls. I’d put together events where I’d bug my family and friends for money. I put together