"Sarah's Gift"
Source: Teen People
Transcribed by: Pamela
Date: October 1999
Barahona, Dominican Republic: Vividly painted houses rub shoulders like spectators at a parade. Motor scooters rip back and forth on this squintingly bright May day; one Yamaha slows down long enough to reveal the image of Jesus Christ on it's hedlamp. Salsa music blares.
At the center of it all is the WB's hottest star, and with the temperature approaching triple digits, that's literally what Sarah Michelle Gellar is. Shovel in hand and, more often than not, bangs in eyes, she's bent over a huge mound of dry cement, doing hard labor. "Next time I'm coming on hammer-and-nail day," she gripes good-naturedly.
It would have been far simpler to shoot her TEEN PEOPLE cover in a photo studio in New York or Los Angeles, but the 22-year-old has requested that we use this press opportunity to travel to the Dominican Republic and let others shine- namely the volunteers of Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit ministry that builds and renovates simple houses with the help of the people who need them. With 80,000 homes constructed as of September, Habitat is assisting people all over the world, and has the support of such celebs as Oprah Winfrey ("She's almost a saint, that woman," says Sarah, an Oprah's Book Club fan) and the band Sixpence None The Richer.
In a roundabout way, Sarah made it to this underdeveloped country via Fiji: It was a visit to a thatched-roof village there over the holidays last year that got her thinking. "[The people] were surviving on the barest essentials, but it was a perfectly running society. They didn't want for anything," she says. Amazed by the Fijians' self-suffiency, Sarah concluded that others should be able to do the same- but they might require a tiny boost first. "It made me realize," she says, "if people can't manage, they need [our] help."
When celebrities back a cause, their involvement usually consists of signing a check and smiling for the accompanying photo op. But with this celebrity and this cause, there is a whole lot more going on. "My mother taught me that whatever you have when you're in a condition to give back, you have to give back," says Sarah, who has been donating to various charities every Christmas since she became a regular on All My Children in 1993. After a while, though, she began to reconsider how best to lend her support. "[I decided that] I wanted something I could feel I was a part of," Sarah explains.
"I'm not going to find a cure for cancer. That's not an ability I have," she continues matter-of-factly. "But I can donate money that will help with research, and I can really do something here."
She'd read about Habitat in the news and loved it's hands-on approach- and the group is equally thrilled with her involvement. "It tells us what we've hoped all along," says president and founder Millard Fuller, "that bright, thoughtful young people like Sarah are getting excited about our mission that everyone in the world has a decent place to live."
And all it takes is some time, some sweat and maybe a blister or two. "It's not just financial support that Habitat needs," Sarah says, "You have the skill to paint houses. If you just have this desire to go, they'll teach you. They'll take you."
Today, Sarah, her publicist and TEEN PEOPLE's seven-person photo-shoot crew are helping to pour the floor in the cinder-block skeleton that will become the residence of Carmen Lydia Yolanda Perez Arias, a single mother who is studying to be a teacher, and her four children. Their current address is right next door, in a wooden dwelling that it topped by a corrugated zinc roof. Like countless other homes in the Dominican Republic, it was battered by Hurricane Georges a year ago. Unlike many of the others, though, it's still standing- but just barely. A group of locals makes up the rest of the construction crew; they are other Habitat home owners, fellow church-goers, friends and relatives.
Sarah smiles as Yolanda's youngest, eight-year-old Omar, shyly steps up to help; twins Yolcedis and Eudisyol, 13, spend more time scrambling around than shoveling. Then, after having instructions translated for her, Sarah passes the information on to everyone who doesn't speak Spanish (pretty much out entire entourage). "Do it so it's not light anymore," she advises, expertly mixing the dusty gray Cemento Titan into the yellow sand like a chef folding flour into her batter. It's dirty, backbreaking work, even for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. "Never have to go to the Reebok Sports Club again," she comments wryly, pausing to wipe her brow.
Now, the crew members stir in water, slop the wet cement into buckets and start passing it down the assembly line and into the house. With one shoe untied and damp spots on her pants showing where she has wiped her hands, a disheveled Sarah joins the bucket brigade, only to have the men bypass her. They're laughing; at five two and maybe 100 pounds, she doesn't really look as if she can keep up with the heavy lifting, but eventually they let her join in the effort.
Room by room, the floor is laid quickly and Yolanda is delighted. Her house will be finished roughly in a month. "My life has been changed [by Habitat] and I feel very happy," she says. Then, Sarah thanks her for being so welcoming, hands over her sneakers from her feet (they should fit Yolanda's daughter, Rhosmaylin, 14) and wearily hops into a van that will take her back to her hotel.
That evening, over cashews and bottled water on a hotel-room balcony, a surprisingly energized Sarah reflects on what this day has meant. "There's something nice about the hope that this gives you, the way everyone worked together," she says. "It restores your faith in humanity."
A cynic might ask, Doesn't smart, talented, beautiful Sarah Michelle Gellar already have everything that one could hope for? And what would the succesful American actress and Maybelline spokeswoman possibly have in common with Yolanda, who earns just over 2,000 pesos a month (about $130) doing cleaning work and has a houseful of children to look after?
"Maybe I can't relate to her life," Sarah acknowledges, "but we feel the same things. The pride in her eyes, in her daughter's eyes"- Rhosmaylin showed their guest her future bedroom and even the boys' pet pigeons in a shed out back- "that's like my mom and me."
Estranged from her father since age seven, Sarah has formed a tight bond with her mother Rosellen. A former kindergarten teacher who can argue "like nobody you've ever met," she taught her only child "if it's something you really want, and it's in your heart, then go for it," says Sarah.
"We never owned anything. We struggled for so long," she continues. "We joked that we ate pasta every night for a week, and Friday night- the big night- we could have Kraft Macaroni and Cheese." Sarah was launched into acting life at the tender age of four, when an agent spotted her having lunch at a New York City restaurant. Twelve years later, she finally hit it big playing Susan Lucci's daughter on All My Children. After two years on the soap (for which she won a Daytime Emmy as Outstanding Younger Actress in 1995), she and her mom left to find fame and fortune in L.A.
It wasn't easy. Sarah say with a laugh that she "couldn't get arrested" before she landed the lead in Buffy. The success of the series has made an incalculable impact on her life. "We never owned anything, and all of a sudden we owned a house. Maybe it was only a different scale [than Yolanda's]," she says, the intensity rising in her voice, "but I know that feeling."
She knows it well enough that she overcame her fear of flying so that she could help bring the same sense of security to Yolanda. The journey went something like this: four and a half hours from Los Angeles to Miami, a two-hour layover, two and a half hours to the Dominican Republic capital of Santo Domingo. Total fear-of-flying hours logged so far: seven. ("It's just takeoff and turbulence," says Sarah of her phobia.)
To get from Santo Domingo to Barahona, her final destination, Sarah had two options: a three hour car ride past endless palm trees and dried up riverbeds, or a 20-minute flight. Already jet-lagged, Sarah opted for speed, which meant she had to take off yet again- this time in a tiny prop plane. "They said, 'Okay, who wants to sit in the copilot's seat?' and I thought 'Maybe I need to do that.'" Somehow, though, in her typical overachiever fashion, she ended up taking the controls. "Pull forward, pull back," she says, mimicking the pilot. "We hit ninety knots!"
Sarah's account of how she braved it to this island in the Caribbean takes much longer than you would think. With rapid-fire delivery that drives all her interviewers to nervously check and recheck their tape to make sure they don't miss a word, she blithely detours onto such topics as The Gossip Show (she has just seen the E! Entertainment Television cable program for the first time), her driving skills (good) and her in-flight reading selections (Esther Freud's Hideous Kinky and Fuller's Habitat history The Theology of the Hammer).
Before this conversation is over, she'll rhapsodize about buddies from high school (she attended New York's Professional Children's School with Charmed star Holly Marie Combs), reveal that she uses her home PC to play You Don't Know Jack and has just installed a currency converter in her Palm Pilot, and offer advice about the importance of reapplying bug spray before going to bed.
The last subject is uniquely Sarah- no bug spray, of course, but words of wisdom. She's as nurturing and giving as they come, full of tips and tricks and recommendations and did-you-knows. And she's as forthcoming with a stranger as she would be with an intimate friend.
"She knows all these little things," says David Boreanaz, who plays the love of Buffy's life, Angel, the vampire with the on-again, off-again soul- and who has Sarah to thank for helping him find a good sushi restaurant. "She could bend your ear for hours."
Joss Whedon, Buffy's creator, looks to Sarah for her business savvy. "She puts it all in perspective," he says. For example: Why did Felicity, and not Buffy the Vampire Slayer, get a Golden Globe nomination? "She said, 'Well, [the Hollywood] Foreign Press [Association, which awards the Globes] doesn't like this and that.' She just breaks it all down."
Or tries to, anyway: When Sarah arrived in Barahona, Palm Pilot in hand, ready to convert pesos to dollars with the touch of a button, she thought she had culture shock covered. She was wrong. "At first, none of us grasped the concept of 'Wait, we can't get an edd-white omelette [sent] to our room?'" she says, only half kidding. "I don't know exactly if I knew what I was expecting."
"There's no question I live a very, very strange life. I came from two weeks in New York, hosting Saturday Night Live, living the princess dream. I had a [chauffer-driven] car wherever I wanted to go, and I could go to Gucci and Prada, and I went to the Star Wars premiere." (FYI: Her tickets to Episode I The Phantom Menace were a birthday gift from George Lucas, whose daughter is a Buffy fan. "When he said to me 'Call me George' that was it," recalls Sarah. "My life is over.")
Her itinerary on the construction site in Barahona was vastly different but, in Sarah's eyes, vastly more satisfying. Her nutshelle version: "Yolanda came out, and she smiled, and they put us to work. It was an incredible, incredible day."
Her habitat experience coincides with the WB's announcement of it's decision to delay airing part to of Buffy's "Graduation Day" season finale, in which Sunnydale High's seniors take up arms against the evil mayor (who metamorphosed into a 60-foot serpent, naturally). The network's motivation, according to it's CEO, Jamie Kellner, was "… sympathy and compassion for the families and communities that have been devastated by the recent senseless acts of violence perpetrated on high school campuses."
Upset and teary eyed, Sarah doesn't mince words with her response. "We're blaming the wrong things," she says. As someone who "grew up with guns around" but was taught not to touch them, she refuses to point a finger to accessibility to firearms. "I'm sorry. Children know it's wrong."
Nor, she says, is it the media's fault. "It's not necessarily a movie's job to teach our children lessons. It's the parents' and the schools' job." She will concede that it's impossible to fully comprehend what can lead to this sort of tragedy. "There is a certain amount of understanding that I don't have," she says sadly. "I don't get Columbine. I don't get what's going on."
After much controversy, and a fan response that included bootleg versions of the episode being downloaded off the internet, the WB did indeed air the episode in July. Now that the fallout has cleared, Buffy Summers is about to embark on her freshman year at UC Sunnydale. She's minus Angel, who left for L.A. (and his own series). Sarah herself is minus a new movie, which makes her practically the only TV supernova who's taking a break from the big screen to have a real vacation. This was a conscious decision, partly because she hungered to 'do some things for me," and partly because she felt burned by her experience with last winter's Simply Irresistable.
"I loved the concept," she says of the romantic comedy. "I love the whole idea of two people falling in love and the only obstacle being themselves." And, adds the fervent Yankee supporter: "I love anything relating to New York." Unfortunately, the script didn't really live up to the concept, and all the little problems that she hoped would iron themselves out just didn't.
The opposite happened with Cruel Intentions. "I'll gush for twenty-five hours about doing it," she says (and for a while, it looks like she'll make good on her word). "I'm so happy with every bit of that movie." Until she can recreate that sense of certainty, she says, she's not going to sign on for another big-screen project.
Besides, just as Yolanda has her new house, so does Sarah. The self-described homebody just moved- with her white Maltese, who goes by the misleading name of Thor- to a place where, she says, "I'm completely me, unaffected by what I do." Her last house was right on the street, which caused major security problems. She sums them up by saying: "I had lots of people come visit me."
Sarah's priority in the new digs: a huge library for her collection of antique children's books. "Leave it to me to find the most expensive hobby in the world," she cracks, then reels off a staggering list of first editions she's aquired, from Goodnight Moon and The Little Engine That Could to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the complete works of J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan.
For her last birthday, her manager gave her a first edition of The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, on which the Nutcracker ballet was based. "All I can think about is one day I can bring that out every Christmas and read it to my child on Christmas Eve," Sarah says excitedly.
When she doesn't have her nose in a book, she has a match in her hand- for firing up the grill. "I'm known for my barbecues," brags Sarah, who seems to be the last nonvegetarian in Hollywood. "I'm a meat eater, really carnivorous," she says mischieviously. "Little steak, little hamburger never hurt anybody." Does she own a KISS THE CHEF apron? Sarah laughs and sidesteps the question with "QUICHE ME, I'M THE COOK- that's my other favorite."
Bad jokes notwithstanding, Sarah makes the best kind of role model- one who doesn't believe she is one (in this case, she just plays one on TV). "I have to separate to a point," Sarah says. "Buffy is the role model. I haven't done anything, in all honesty, except maybe go after my dream." And perhaps make a dream or two come true for someone else while she's at it.