GREEN RIDGE, Missouri. Brooke Bennett grew up in this tiny but busy farming hamlet nestled among fields of sorghum, lespedeza and timothy, which boasts not one but two full-time village idiots. “It was great to be a kid here,” she says of a childhood spent milking cows and raising calves for auction at her 4-H Club, “but it’s time for me to move on.”
Lespedeza: Not available at a grocery store near you.
Brooke is valedictorian of her class and has been accepted at Wellesley College in a suburb of Boston. Before she arrives on campus, however, she and other “GRTS,” an acronym that stands for “General Rural Talent Search,” will spend a week at Inward Bound, a rural-to-suburban “boot camp” that teaches them how to survive in an upscale suburb.
“You think I should have ordered the Double Choco-Mocha instead of the Strawbanna Smoothie?”
“These kids know nothing but fresh air and small-town values like thrift and hard-work,” says Inward Bound camp counselor Meghan Fritz, who herself came from a small town to attend Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. “We teach them Starbucks Esperanto so they can order venti macchiatos and survive in the jungle of a suburban shopping mall.”
“I don’t know how I ever lived without a Push-Up Bra!”
Inward Bound is modelled after Outward Bound, the program that develops self-esteem in troubled youth by plunking them down in wilderness settings and teaching them how to survive on minimal food, tools and guidance from adults. Inward Bound drops off groups of four girls with nothing but a cell phone, a credit card, and a copy of Teen Girl Power magazine (this month’s feature: “Are You a Hannah or a Miley Girl?) at a multi-level shopping mall, and forces them to survive a harrowing weekend of mulish adolescent boys and catty remarks from other, more sophisticated girls.
“Since there were only two of us in our senior class, we flipped a coin to see who’d be valedictorian.”
“I was like really scared at first,” says Melinda Fallows, a native of Hoxie, Arkansas, who will attend Georgetown University in the fall. “All we had to eat was chewing gum and Starbursts, and we couldn’t buy anything on sale unless we spent our own money.” Melinda emerged from the experience a more self-confident young woman, says her mother Tina. “Before Inward Bound she dressed like she was President of the National Honor Society, which she was,” Tina says. “Once she maxxed out her credit card she looked like a cross between a professor of women’s studies and a pole dancer.”