She’ll Feel at Home in the City of Angels
The host will be on the same plane as her 19 new best friends, kids with scarfs and scars, many dying, all very much alive.
They will have just spent a week joyously chasing their fears through the Aspen mountains. They will be returning to faraway homes and hospitals, armed with a toll-free number for the nights those demons return.
Only this time, Andrea Jaeger will be on the plane with them, because she will be flying to Los Angeles.
It will be Aug. 6, a Wednesday.
At the Manhattan Country Club dinner that evening, at precisely 6:15, wine bottles will be stilled, the tinkle of silverware will cease.
The tennis missionary will step to a podium to make her first official public appearance in a town that has embraced her as its own.
Wearing a baggy sweatsuit.
“Oh, come on,” Jaeger said, giggling. “You think I should actually wear a dress? It is a tennis tournament, isn’t it?”
She will then give a speech about her Silver Lining Ranch, a retreat for children with life-threatening illnesses. It is an endeavor into which she has donated everything from her career earnings to, well, her fancy dresses.
She will have no idea what she will say until she says it.
“I never write my speeches in advance because, it’s like, you may miss the the moment,” she said. “You know what I mean?”
Jaeger will then sit down to dinner, but not with the female tennis stars who are expected to attend during the Acura Classic tennis tournament in Manhattan Beach.
At her table, at her elbow, will be Melissa Schweisberger, a 12-year-old tennis star from Ranchos Palos Verdes who was stricken with bone cancer last summer shortly before her mother read of Jaeger’s work.
When Margarita Schweisberger heard of Jaeger’s appearance here, she picked up the phone, called around, and tried to arrange for her daughter to meet her.
When Jaeger finally got the message, her response was this:
“Cool! Pull up a chair!”
Said Margarita: “I was so inspired by hearing that, I could hardly talk.”
Beginning with the dinner, and for three days afterward during the tournament, Jaeger would like to make that same offer to the entire Southland.
Pull up a chair. Shake her hand. Ask her about her kids.
Allow her to say thanks.
Thanks for belonging to a community that has already donated more than $100,000 to the building of an actual ranch that will house the sick children who will visit her six times a year.
Since this newspaper has published two stories in the last year detailing Jaeger’s work, donations have flowed from this massive place to her tiny mountain office.
Local businesses have been inspired to give thousands. Local children have sent five dollars worth of coins.
As recently as last week, Jaeger and assistant Heidi Bookout--who will be accompanying her here with assistant Beene Smyley--were opening two letters that made them shake their heads.
The first one contained a huge check from a Los Angeles-based corporation.
The second one contained a $10 donation from a 72-year-old Orange County man who inexplicably enclosed a photo of himself wearing a stylish golf hat.
“That said it all about your town,” Jaeger said. “We are being helped by the large, and the small, and all of it is so inspirational.”
Although the official purpose of the visit is to speak at that Aug. 6 dinner and auction for her charity--the Acura Classic Kids Stuff Benefit--Jaeger plans to be giving more than she gets.
“I just want to let everyone know about this wonderful bridge that has been built from Aspen to Los Angeles,” she said. “I want everyone to know how grateful I am.”
As of a couple of days ago, there were still seven tables remaining for the dinner. There were four tables for 10 people, three for six people, costing between $600 and $1,000, including food, drink and seats for Martina Hingis’ match that night.
Call (310) 545-3200, and you could meet her that way.
Or you could just show up sometime later in the week. She’s busy, but she’ll be around, and she’s hard to miss.
She’ll be the one with the holes in her socks.
Jaeger was jumping on a trampoline with friends the other day when they noticed this unique style.
“Doesn’t Nike send you new socks?” she was asked.
“Sure they do,” she said. “But I’m always giving them away.”
For those reading about her new life for the first time, a bit of background:
After enduring several sometimes abusive seasons as a teenage tennis star, climbing as high as No. 2 in the world rankings yet never quite feeling she belonged, Jaeger quit to search for something more meaningful.
Five years ago, she found it by hanging out with other teenagers who never quite feel they belong--those with life-threatening illnesses.
She gathered a group of tennis buddies and together they began holding weeklong camps for these children. The camps are unique in that the enrollment is small (never more than 20 kids at a time) and that the camp director (Jaeger) acts more like the kids than the kids.
Pizza parties, water fights, rafting, just hanging out . . . the schedule is never much more complicated than that.
Most special is that Jaeger encourages campers to become part of a family.
Upon leaving, every child is given a toll-free number that rings directly to Jaeger’s crowded mountainside home.
That phone rings throughout the day and night, fills with the voices of jubilant kids who have just finished chemotherapy, or frightened kids who are just starting it again.
Often, the phone rings with calls from parents, with news of a death.
If nobody answers, somebody always calls back.
For those who just want to keep in touch, there is also a monthly newsletter filled with notes from campers from as far back as five years ago.
To support everything from the phone to the entire cost of four annual weekly sessions in Aspen--and a couple of sessions on the road--Jaeger spent her $1.4-million career earnings and adopted a lifestyle that includes a borrowed car and borrowed clothes.
Even her dreams have been donated, to the building of a permanent 16,000-square-foot ranch so they no longer have to hold pottery-painting parties in hotel hallways.
So far, $3 million of the necessary $4.3 million has been raised. It’s enough that, on a bit of donated Aspen pasture, groundbreaking ceremonies will be held just before she arrives in Los Angeles.
It’s enough that sometimes, she drives to the edge of that field and stares at it long enough to see children playing in the high grass.
Don’t worry, she won’t pressure anybody here to give her the rest of the money.
Even though she may only have enough for the shell and the roof, she’ll figure it out.
“Even if I have to get up there and hammer myself,” she said.
She can do it too. Come meet her next month. Shake the hand. Feel the strength.
