“It’s Expensive So It Must Be Good”- Review of Legacy’s Literature’s Two New Releases: The Elissa’s by Samantha Leach & Sipping Dom Perignon Through A Straw by Eddie Ndopu
by Jeneane Vanderhoof
From Legacy Literature a new release and soon to be, The Elissa by Samantha Leach and Sipping Dom Perignon Through A Straw- both proved to this avid reader- that when it comes to books, Legacy Literature is far and above other publishers, when it comes to the power of the stories their authors publish, the quality of the literature they release to the public. Because as I read each book I found myself in awe of what I was reading, unable to put either of them down. As I go into the future, I look forward to seeing their next, new, awesome authors and the literature they will bring to readers!
First I’d like to cover The Elissas, by Samantha Leach- who has produced a wonderful memoir about a girl she grew up with Elissa and her two friends, also named Alyssa and Alissa (surely a popular name for girls, at the time). “Save Our Souls,” was the tattoo that the three girls shared, along with a broken heart and angel wings.
Growing up a decade before the trio, I have a tattoo very much like the one they share (without the words though), a shattered heart, with flames, spikes, a heart that has already, at the young age of eighteen when I got it, thought to be demolished by the world around me. As I read about their tattoos and their stories, I realized I was very much like these suburban girls, albeit with a little less family money. Because, like them, I was “troubled”, needed help, and ended up in a system much like these girls did.
Leach, in The Elissas, shares the memories she has with her friend growing up, Elissa. As they grow into the young women they are to become, unfortunately, the role models they have in the public eye, in the media, to pick out to emulate and learn from do not put them in the best path to become who they really should want to be. What could we expect from a generation of girls who had young women (if we can call them that), like Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, reality television stars on The Simple Life (which the girls watched and emulated), Hilton coining the term “that’s hot”?
I was in my early twenties when two young women I deemed jackasses, went on the air. Paris Hilton and Niucole Richie, I never thought they would be anyone to look up to for a young woman, the joke they seemed to be to me as I watched the things they did on air. I didn’t think that young girls would think they should be like them- I thought parents would say something, teach their children to be more than these two girls were. But, I should have remembered what my own mother taught me- which really was very little. When it comes to the things we learn to model growing up, young girls are very much at their own or at the mercy of what they see in the media.
When it comes to Elissa and Smantha and the things they learned from the young women around them in the spotlight, you can only imagine, if you think back to the time, what these young girls would turn out like. While it was shocking to hear of Elissa’s first sexual experience in her friend’s bathroom with two boys, after what the two were seeing in the world around them, Paris Hilton and her sex tape, the fact that Elissa had no problem turning over nude pictures of herself to classmates, no surprise either. And, what you see that this did to these young girls, as they turned into young women and adults, the actions they took played a major part in the destruction of their lives- when it comes to the Elissas (as Samantha Leach managed to escape the Troubled Teen Industry path).
While Samantha never met the other Alissa/ Alyssa’s, she interviewed those close to the girls, other friends close to them, much like herself, and family. Alyssa (the second) was different from Elissa (the first) in that while Elissa wanted many boys, Alyssa only one. However that one boy would be a major part of what destroyed her, their relationship not healthy, full of drugs, danger and trouble.
Another insight into Alyssa’s life is brought from a project long before she was born, John Huges and his movie, The Breakfast Club- her life very much like the “white public school filled with the middle-of- the-pack, upper-middle-class teens prone to the kind of debauchery to which adults offer a knowing wink.”
Maybe, Leach asserts in her book, that the gateway to some of the more expensive programs called “gateway programs to the Troubled Teen Industry” (which is where the Elissa will meet), or, the way in, a web of therapeutic boarding schools that preach tough love and practice behavior modification- That there is no publicity around the industry, that when investigating these programs in 2007 it was discovered many teenagers in these programs were ineffectively managed, that teens were made to eat dirt or were starved.
Leach also questions the ease with which the first program was recommended to Alyssa’s parents, after a few questions to them (the “education consultant”, as they are called, never spoke directly with Alyssa) and one failed drug test. However, could the large price tag attached to the program, its fee, be the reason it was recommended? Because, despite how expensive it was, the parents are always told to “do everything they can to save their child”- always being given the implication that no matter the cost or even how effective the program had been, in the past, with other troubled teenagers who went through it- to just go for it, spend the money and send your troubled teen to us. Isn’t it worth anything to save your child?
Alissa, the third of the trio, was from Omaha, Nebraska, her parents, having had their children in pairs. First the oldest pair, and a decade later, the second set, of which Alissa was the last. Mothered by the oldest of the two sets, Mary, her elder sister, the birth order put Alissa in direct succession to get spoiled, which she did. She got everything she wanted and more. Changes in Alissa’s behavior, despite the cliche regarding “daddy issues”, however really seemed to coincide with changes in the relationship she had with her father.
When Leach speaks of D.A.R.E. I am reminded of my introduction to it, what I thought about the program and what others thought around me, my peers about it, the impressions I got from them. While I am sure there were changes over the years, hope there were changes to what we saw and heard in the program- the few hours of the one day I remember of the once a year assembly, workbook given, speech made, mascot seen- there is very little that stuck with me of what the program was about other that it told us not to do drugs. I never felt informed and, had the assembly for the program continued a little further, with smaller discussion about the program after, anything, maybe I would have got a better sense of what the D.A.R.E. wanted to convey. The small mention of it in the book though, seems to speak to me and say, the message wasn’t well received at the time, by our generation, either. And, that all three Elissas had drug or drinking issues is no surprise either. What troubled suburban teen didn’t?
Leach also speaks of Alissa’s (the third), problems with her body image, something many young women don’t escape. She speaks to her parents who convey that there were explosive fights about her body- her parents were never able to help the girl find any good way to look at herself. Of course they tried to find her help but, when it comes to the help they found, like the other two Elissa, much money was spent on programs to help the girls- in the Troubled Teen Industry (so dubbed), though none of it worked.
During the time the Elissas spent jumping into programs “educational consultants” recommended and encouraged their parents to enroll them in, along with the hefty payment attached to each one, there were times when escape attempts were made, where the girls tried to get out of being enrolled into these programs. Alyssa the second made her escape when switching from one program to the next, at the O’Hare airport, where her hometown friends were able to pick her up, instead of her parents. It is shared with readers that to discourage this, many times a “transporter” is employed, someone who “minds” the “charge” (the troubled teen) from anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000.
Other jobs that the “transporter” may do is to take an unsuspecting troubled teen in the middle of the night, kidnap them at the parents’ behest, and take them to their destination. This is done even if, and especially, if the troubled teen puts up a fight. What would a “transporter” be for, if not the worst of the worst behavior? Some troubled teens have had their hands tied or cuffed. Affidavits are even signed, to turn parental consent over to the “transporter”, even giving medical power of attorney. This was done for the first Elissa, when she was taken from her bedroom to a wilderness program in Montana. After the first transporter Elissa’s parents had to trust her to go to her next program, the expense, too overwhelming.
When the third Alissa went to a Kum & Go (never heard of the chain) and shoplifted, wanting her way, when she was caught, she was determined to leave with what she wanted, despite the fact that the cashier knew what she had done and threatened to call the police. That her parents had taught her to get what she wanted and to fight for it, applying this theory to everything, even things that didn’t legally belong to her, seemed to compute, in the young girl’s mind too. Arrested for shoplifting, though she got off with a slap on the wrist, much like celebrities who commit crimes- Leach comments that “She, Alissa, and I had a privilege that made us relatively immune to the more severe consequences of the criminal justice system. We were safe to break bad as we pleased”.
Surprisingly it is Paris Hilton who releases a documentary that exposes the dirty underbelly of the Troubled Teen Industry. However it is no surprise why Paris Hilton does this- that she attended one of these places- no surprise either, when you look at how Hiton puts herself out into the world, the way she acts, treats others, the things she does and says. Who wouldn’t want a girl like Paris Hilton to change? Especially because she was in the forefront of the media, because of who her parents are.
It is a shame that wherever Paris Hilton was sent as a youth, that it didn’t do more to change who she was, that the program didn’t work- that much is evident when we see the way in which Hilton acted when she was old enough to go places, to do things on her own. Case in point is the reality show she did, the sex tape she made, and all the other evidence of her misdeeds in the media. We have a generation of girls who looked up to Paris Hilton, modeled their behavior after her, when all the while mothers, older sisters, and anyone with a brain who knew that young girls were looking up to Paris needed to block anything their girls could see about this woman.
After reading Samantha Leach and what she has to say about the effect Paris Hilton had on her and her friends, I firmly believe Hilton managed to help ruin a generation of young girls, if not ruin them all on her own. Had Hilton hid what she was doing better from the media, had some sense, decorum, anything, she would have found a brain a lot sooner, and not acted like a slut and a fool for most of her youth, maybe we wouldn’t have had a generation of girls misguided when it came to the way in which they thought about themselves, when it came to men, other people and the world.
Breaking Code Silence is a nonprofit agency which fights for the rights of those in the Troubled Teen Industry. But since there are still no federal regulations in the industry in 2021 (when the book was written), there don’t seem to be many rights of those who are institutionalized in these places, put there by the wishes of their parents and the many dollars they want to spend. And, with all the money that rolls in because of the high cost of the programs, who can blame those who run them? Of course, if there is a need people are going to try and fill it. The shame comes when those who fill it do it poorly which, it seems, the entire industry is overrun with- those who are doing nothing right, nothing to change anything in the lives of these teens. If anything, there is only more damage and, in the end, the inevitable death of the teen far too soon in life.
Far behind on the techniques they employ in the industry, behavior modification is the standard, a method created by American psychologist B.F. Skinner in the 1940’s. Though the practice is often denied, many institutions in the Troubled Teen Industry use the eighty year old practice, looking for nothing new, nothing successful. The most backward of all is “attack therapy” or “synanon”, from a 1958 rehab turned cult, in which participants are made to “endure intense and profanity- laced criticism from their peers, often leading to both physical and verbal abuse.” A “softer” form of the therapy is called “feedback groups” which has still shown to leave lasting damage on participants of the therapy (if it should even be called that). Leach shares all this and more in The Elissas.
What I found unique about Nebraska is that if teenagers are sent to one of the institutions in the state after their 18th birthday, they can be held there, because the state does not consider a person an adult until the age of 19. That meant that participants could not check themselves out on their eighteenth birthday so the state became a haven to keep troubled teens in their clutches for one more year. Ponca Pines is one of the schools in the state and was where all three of the Elissa’s eventually met. Both were sent just before they turned eighteen. Shortly after the first two arrived, the third Alissa joined to make the trio complete.
Like the Elissa’s, I had been part of the Troubled Teen industry, a white, middle class girl from the suburbs. However, while they were middle to upper middle class, I was more lower middle class, which meant, when it came to the Troubled Teen Industry, my family couldn’t afford programs that the Elissa’s could. At least not more than once. Because, after my bout with trouble, after the criminal justice system chewed me up a bit and spit me out, I landed in a wealthy suburban rehab, far from where I lived (which was still a wealthier area)- where I stayed for several months, rather than spend more time in juvenile detention.
But I was a generation before these girls, a little less wealthy then they, a different religion (Catholic, where they were Jewish). But, many of what Leach shares in the book about the Elissa’s, I find that I can relate to. And, if not relate, emote- feel very sorry for these girls (even Leach, with having to lose a friend she obviously loved enough to research and write this book about- Elissa and her friends). I also find I can feel much sadness, anger, and disappointment for all those that failed the girls- especially The Troubled Teen Industry and all the money taken from their parents- from the beginning of their short lives to their bitter end. Honestly, all white girls from the suburbs can relate to The Elissas because if you weren’t an Elissa, in a way, you were friends with one,and saw their sinking ship go down, no matter how fast, or slow.
The Elissa’s shares with readers the ugly side of what it can be like to grow up as a young white girl in the suburbs. Especially once The Troubled Teen Industry gets a hold of the parents of these teens and the children are taken, often for the rest of their youth, to skip along from one program to the next as the price tags attached get higher and higher- only in the end to find your troubled teen is most likely in a worse spot than they began. The Elissa’s show that really, when it comes down to it, all the money spent, was never worth it. Only a smoke and mirror show with an ignorant old snake oil salesman behind a curtain, who claims to be a wizard that will fix your child- in the end returning a changeling that isn’t even yours anymore, doesn’t want to be yours, any longer- if he returns anything at all. That this is a personal story to Samantha Leach (and there is NO DOUBT to the reader, that it is), makes it all the better, putting it in the upper echelons of literature, for readers- entertaining, emotive and endearing, The Elissas will be a book that you remember for a lifetime and will often recommend to others, in the future (if you pick it up and read it- you must)!
Next, a book released in August, Eddie Ndopu’s first, Sipping Dom Perignon Through A Straw- was a book I picked up on a bad day, hoping to lift my spirits by reminding myself that life could be worse. Knowing the book was written by a man with only the use of his one finger, having been born with a rare form of spinal muscular atrophy, I knew there would be hurdles, pitfalls and broken promises, among other traumas in the book, however I was unprepared for much of what Ndopu went through in his plight to attend Oxford University after receiving a scholarship from the college. Because, I had surmised (much like Ndopu must first have), that in receiving a scholarship, he would be covered, expense wise, when it came to attending the school. But, that would not be the case- AT ALL- with Ndopu’s story. And it was a hard one, for him- to even read, it was HARD!
Even before he reached England Ndopu incurred issues, with having to bring a caregiver with him- a visa must be obtained for them. Ndopu, though, could only get one for himself. That Ndopu had no help hiring a personal caregiver, having to go through an agency- the extra fees alone associated with having to pay an agency to dictate who would care for him- readers can only imagine the problems that began from this alone. And just like I needed loans to cover my living expenses when I went to college with a scholarship, when it came to the costs associated with Ndopu’s- none of these things were covered either- despite the fact Oxford knew of his disability before his acceptance.
And while Oxford did accommodate some things for Ndopu- like a special room, his own personal bathrooms attached and rooms for his (sometimes needed) multiple aids- when it came to the costs associated with caregivers and medical treatment, the poor hard working kid was on his own. In fact, at times, when Ndopu found a way to meet these needs, as he did when a large supporter of the college offered to cover the rest of the expense money he needed, the college officials got in the way, making opportunities disappear before his very eyes.
Meeting these costs was not easy for a young man from a developing country like Namibia- unlike many of his peers at Oxford I am sure loans were not made to his parents or to himself, as easily. Sadly, these are things, when colleges who accept students from countries like these need to think about- the fairness of it all, the ease at which others get things, and others do not! That funds need to be set up to help out students from countries who may not receive loans with ease- is an understatement.
Making his way to Class President, Oxford often humiliated Ndopu with the things he was made to do- just to obtain the money he needed to get his degree. And when he finally got the money he needed, after much hard work, the help of loved ones and friends and even the media- Ndopu was often debated, criticized, for the way in which he wanted to use small bits of his money. For instance, when a caregiver suggested Ndopu express himself with a special hairdo, the fact that a little money was spent on it, the situation became a debate in one of the Oxford classrooms. Because, in the end, Ndopu’s money had been donated by classmates, friends, those who wanted to help, all done by crowdfunding. However a lot of work, strain and stress was put on Ndopu and his friends to reach out to those that could help- he did interviews, met with acquaintances of friends that could help and was always worrying about whether or not he would reach his goal and be able to obtain an Oxford degree. Readers will cringe, as I did, at many of the aspects of Ndopu’s life, the things he was subjected to.
Readers will never be more impressed with the humanitarian, the person, than Eddie Ndopu is. Never in my life have I met a bigger fighter, warrior, person of wisdom and a youth that brings hope and growth to our next generation than this young man. Sipping Dom Perignon Through A Straw was a tough book to read, I must admit, to hear what Ndopu went through. But these are things we all need to know to help Ndopu change them, which is why he went to Oxford- to gain the knowledge, wisdom and the education needed to make changes for people like himself for the better- To make a better world for us all.
Because, after reading Sipping Dom Perignon Through A Straw, readers like me must agree that we need a better world- and a lot of things to change. They say that change starts right at home, really, with yourself. Reading about Eddie Ndopu’s journey is one of the ways you can help bring about that change. If only…to know. For now, that can be enough.
Happy Reading!