Parents Rally Around to Aid a Friend

For two years now, the friends of Renee Lacouague-Bondi have gathered to Rally Round Renee. They raised $8,000 at the Coach House on Monday night, and plan to hold another benefit for her there Oct. 1.

As a member of a San Juan Capistrano family whose ancestors settled here near the turn of the century, Lacouague-Bondi went to the Mission School, directed the mission’s youth choirs, and was a music teacher at San Clemente High School before her life changed suddenly on May 16, 1988.

On that Sunday evening--just a day after her future husband, Mike Bondi, gave her an engagement ring--she went to bed and suffered a serious accident in her sleep. Somehow, she fell out of bed and broke her neck, causing a spinal injury that threatened to turn her into a quadriplegic.

For two months, she had no sensation from her neck down. Then began the first hints of a breakthrough.

“I was lying in a Long Beach hospital, and I felt a little muscle contraction in my left arm,” she said.

Today, Renee Lacouague-Bondi, 32, and her husband live in a new home next door to her parents. Sitting upright in a wheelchair and having regained the use of her shoulders and arms, she is an example of the rewards of daily physical therapy.

“I took it step by step,” she said. “I’ve always been that way, maybe because of my training as a teacher. Instead of taking on a humongous project all at once, I chip away at it. But my first thought was that I wanted to sit up and sing, and I’d worry about walking later.”

Since the days of choir at Mission San Juan Capistrano, singing has been a part of her life. Before her accident, she was a five-year member of the Young Americans touring group, traveling and performing around the world.

“She was always a very active and independent girl. She was always on the go--always,” says her mother, Marie Lacouague. “She still is that way, which I think is very good for her.”

Now, instead of teaching in the Capistrano Unified School District, she has returned to the mission, once again directing the youth choirs. The physical part of conducting the choirs is part of her therapy process, she says.

“The mission has always been there for me. Somehow, my life always comes back to that mission,” she said. “But conducting has been very good for me. It’s a physical act, like an exercise.”

Two years after her accident and the upheaval in her life, Lacouague-Bondi still submits to the frustration it has all caused her and her family.

“Sometimes it hits me, like the other night when I was preparing for bed, and I get mad. I think, ‘What the hell am I doing this way?’ All I want to do is get up, walk in the bathroom and wash my face and go to bed,” she explained. “The whole thing still blows me away.”

But the saving graces in her situation, besides the mission, have been her family, her daily attendant, Carol Hamilton, and her husband, she said.

“Mike is one incredible man,” she said. “He has said he would stand by me through everything and he has.”

Her friends and alumni of the Young Americans are gathered in the South County for this year’s benefit performances. Last year, the six parents who make up the core of the Rally Round Renee group raised $35,000 to buy her a specially-equipped van. This year their goal is $15,000 to $20,000, enough to pay for her attendant five days a week, said Monica Hunnicutt.

“We’ve estimated that will pay for attendant care for one year,” Hunnicutt said. “We’ll wait and see next year what else we can do.”

At the Coach House benefit on Oct. 1, Lacouague-Bondi will also perform. The benefit earlier this week was “absolutely wonderful,” Hunnicutt said, although the house was only half full.

“We got together right after the accident,” Hunnicutt explained, “because we were hurting and our children, who were students of Renee’s, were hurting. We all loved Renee so much. We got together to talk things out, to comfort ourselves and our children, and Rally Round Renee was the outgrowth of that.”