Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(13)
Though protest is an integral part of the Catholic Worker credo, feeding the homeless and the destitute takes priority. And it was in the garden of the Hippie Kitchen—a small outdoor haven that’s filled with colorful murals, the chirping of Brazilian finches in an aviary, and water bubbling over a fountain—that Meghan Markle had what could only be described as an epiphany.
She first visited the Hippie Kitchen when she was just thirteen and found the experience “very scary.” By the time Meghan enlisted as a volunteer in the early 1990s, the composition of the homeless neighborhood had drastically changed, from mainly old, white male drunks to a new, younger and more volatile community of those high on crack cocaine and other deadly drugs. “I was young, and it was rough and raw down there and, though I was with a great volunteer group, I just felt overwhelmed,” she later recalled.
She may well have chalked the visit up to experience and never ventured there again but for a classroom conversation with her Immaculate Heart High School theology teacher Maria Pollia some three years later. During class Maria, who had been a volunteer at the Hippie Kitchen for years, described her own early experience and how she faced up to her fears and doubts.
“It’s one of the worst corners of Skid Row,” she says. “One of the most distressed and distressing. It is heartbreaking. Driving through at night it looked like something Charles Dickens would be writing about. People huddled around blazing oil drums. It was very, very frightening. An awakening for me.” Her message to the class, though, was to put your fears aside and make contact with the homeless on a human level. They are people, too, people with names, people with a past and hopefully a future.
“Life is about putting the needs of others above your own fears,” she counseled. It was a message that resonated with sixteen-year-old Meghan. “That has always stayed with me,” she later recalled.
After class, Meghan spoke with her teacher, who advised on the practicalities of volunteering at the Hippie Kitchen. Heartened, Meghan began to go regularly, working as a server and clearing tables, which put her directly in contact with the Hippie Kitchen’s guests. Maria Pollia recalls: “What she learned was what I learned—that it is the human contact people crave. It’s someone saying hello and knowing your name.” Meghan earnestly absorbed all the advice and began to come back with stories from the people she had met and connected with.
“It was remarkable that once in the situation she got right in it. She wasn’t just handing out stew and letting everyone go by, but she was connecting with people, she was learning their names and listening to their stories.” And, as Catherine Morris observes, everyone on Skid Row has a story. It might be a hard luck story, a never catching a break story, or a wrong turn story; they would all be eye opening for Meghan, offering a new perspective on what kind of life you could be dealt. The homeless are human beings, not mere statistics.
Megan’s experience was echoed by others such as schoolgirl volunteer Sophie Goldstein, who described how she, too, confronted her fears and concerns. “When I first came here, I have to admit, I was kind of nervous.” she wrote on the Catholic Worker blog. “I saw the area and I was scared. Then I met the people. What the Workers told me was that a lot of the time these were people who couldn’t meet up with their bills, and now they’re stuck, or that they have drug problems. I got to put a face on my own prejudice.
“I realized that these are real people. They are not just crazy homeless that you hear about all the time, or that my friends talk about, or the flippant remarks that people make about the homeless.” For Meghan it was a life-affirming and life-changing experience.
Up to that point, Meghan’s only other experience of work was at Humphrey Yogart, a frozen yogurt shop where she worked when she was thirteen, serving customers and taking out the trash for $4 an hour, employed under a California law that permitted youngsters enrolled in school to work ten to twelve hours a week. Owner Paula Sheftel recalls that Meghan was a hard worker and popular with the customers, “who had to prove she had an outgoing personality and would work well with staff.”
“A lot of the kids can’t handle the pressure. It takes a special personality for somebody that young to deal with it. Meghan had that early on.” Meghan had ample opportunity to practice her people skills at the often fast-paced fro-yo shop, but she also gained another valuable lesson that would later serve her well. One afternoon Meghan saw Yasmine Bleeth, one of the stars of Baywatch and a particular idol of hers. Finishing up with the trash bin, Meghan approached the star and blurted out, “I really like you in that Soft N Dri commercial.” Bleeth smiled, asked Meghan her name, and shook her hand. Later Meghan would say, “That moment with Yasmine is exactly what I base every interaction with fans on.”
A yogurt shop in Beverly Hills was a far cry from the Hippie Kitchen at Sixth and Gladys, which, like her travels with her mother to Mexico and Jamaica, honed her awareness. As she later observed: “Yes, make sure you are safe and never ever put yourself in a compromising situation, but once that is checked off the list, I think it’s really important for us to remember that someone needs us, and that your act of giving/helping/doing can truly become an act of grace once you get out of your head.”
If this was a practical application of her spiritual journey, her encounter with the work of Catholic theologian Thomas Merton emphasized her intellectual curiosity and emotional maturity. In a world of black and white, Merton’s mercurial thinking, with its endless shape-shifting vista of gray, of muted maybes and possibilities, is hard to pin down.