by RICK DANLEY // September 23, 2017
Fate smiled on eight high school boys Thursday morning when former Miss Kansas Adrienne Bulinski plucked them from among hundreds of students gathered at the Bowlus Fine Arts Center. She sat them in a row on stage and, after a minute of lively banter, sang a suggestive version of a Marvin Gaye song, making her way down the line, ladling special attention on each young man, whose face shifted from pink to red anytime the beauty queen neared their chair.
Bulinski stroked the hair of one student, tickled the pinkening cheek of another, invited the tallest boy to dance. The crowd hooted and clapped, and then it was over, and the boys, their molecules officially rearranged, were led back to their seats, and Bulinski began her talk.
The event was part of the Kansas State High School Activities Association Regional Student Council Conference (for short), and Bulinski’s was the keynote speech.
Adrienne Rosel-Bulinski, to give her her full name, is an award-winning motivational speaker, a former professional singer and dancer, and the author of the 2016 memoir “Blood, Sweat & Tiaras.”
Having converted the eight male adolescents to her side, Bulinski spent the next hour on the Bowlus stage weaving an enchantment of laughter and tears that left the remaining StuCo delegates equally prey to her charms. “You will not leave the same person you were when you walked in here,” promised Bulinski, who would go on to trace the arc of her 34 years for the many visiting students drawn to Iola from all parts of southeast Kansas. “If you are, then I did not do my job. What I’m going to give you right now, I have fought to learn.”
BULINSKI GREW UP in Liberal, but she had her sights fixed on a brighter horizon from day one. She wanted to be a dancer. She wanted to be singer. She wanted to star on Broadway!
After graduating from the University of Kansas with a degree in journalism — but having logged countless hours in the practice studio, singing and dancing — she set about making her song-and-dance dream a reality.
After a brief post-graduate excursion to Topeka, where she managed to crush the well-coiffed dreams of thirty of her peers in the 2005 Miss Kansas competition — which was never her goal, says Bulinski; only a perk along the path of her meteoric rise — Bulinski made her move to New York City.
Finally…she was singing! She was dancing! It may not have been in the smash Broadway hits that had decorated her thoughts as a little girl. But she was making a living doing what she loved. And, anyway, she was young still. The future was hers.
Answering a call to star in an outdoor musical staged in Texas, depicting the history of Texas — titled, you guessed it: “Texas” — Bulinski packed her bags for Amarillo. The show went well. Bulinski scored high marks and enjoyed her role in the spotlight.
One day, toward the end of the run, Bulinski and her friends visited a ranch outside town. She was going to learn to ride a horse. After a long of day of riding, Bulinski went to mount her animal a final time. But something went wrong. Bulinski hooked her right foot in the stirrup. This time, though, the horse spooked and Bulinski went flying. Her foot remained caught in the apparatus, while the rest of her continued airborne. Her right foot was completely severed. When Bulinski hit the ground, she attempted to take one more step but only ended up driving six inches of exposed bone into the soil. The doctors would go on to remove more than a cup of dirt and manure from her leg when she finally arrived at the hospital.
The Bowlus auditorium was heavy with silence as Bulinski told of her years-long struggle to save her foot.
Doctors warned that she may never walk again, that she’d likely require an amputation. These days, though, she doesn’t even limp.
Bulinski raised her floor-length skirt enough to show the crowd the large bulbous protrusion on the front of her ankle, which is a skin graft covering an expensive prosthetic joint. “I call this my third boob,” said Bulinski, who then idly recalled for the crowd the time she met a woman who actually did have a third breast. “She and I could have been friends.”
BULINSKI’S was a message of uplift: of sticking to your dreams despite steep odds (“If you can achieve your dream in six months or a year,” she said, “it’s not a dream — it belongs on your to-do list. A dream should terrify you.”); of learning that life’s harsher moments can often be reshaped by a good attitude (“A quote I love: ‘Life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you react to it.’”); of believing that by dedicating even just five minutes a day toward your goal, you can achieve it.
To illustrate this final point, Bulinski retrieved a large Tupperware container from a table behind where she stood. She opened it and showed the contents to the audience. It was a large rainbow-colored mass of something, about the size of a small casserole. “What I have here,” explained Bulinski, “is a 12-year-old wad of chewing gum.”
During her early twenties, Bulinski gave herself a new challenge to help her meet old goals. She’d pop a piece of gum into her mouth and work on her dance moves until the flavor ran out, at which point she would add the piece of chewed gum to the ever-growing brick of gum that had gone before. She did this for one year. On Thursday, she passed the container under the noses of the students in the front row, who stared with semi-disgusted awe into the stale mass. At that point, Bulinski, with effort, peeled off a long blue strip of the tasteless substance and held it up for the audience to see.
And then, dear reader, she put it in her mouth. “Mmmm,” she said. Oh, the groans that went up in the auditorium that day! They loved it.
RG danley 