She finally found herself at the homeless shelter
| Saturday, Aug 29 2009 10:19 PM
Last Updated Saturday, Aug 29 2009 10:20 PM
Her roommates were a tad suspicious at first. What was a beautiful, trim athletic blonde doing at the Bakersfield Homeless Center, clutching her purse to her chest like it was her last possession on earth?
Because it was.
Shari Rightmer had hit bottom. Broke and alone with no prospects to speak of, she'd driven to the shelter on East Truxtun Avenue, praying there'd be an empty bed. It took a few hours, but one became available: Bunk No. 11. She took it gratefully.
Rightmer didn't sleep at all that first night. She cried and clutched that purse of hers, though it contained nothing of significance except for a driver's license and an insurance card. Not that it would have mattered much: The woman in the next bunk woke up every few minutes with night terrors.
The next morning Rightmer experienced her first breakfast at the "Bethany Bistro." She tried keeping to herself, but a few fellow "clients" couldn't help themselves: They approached and asked if perhaps Rightmer was some sort of undercover officer. She just didn't seem to belong.
Who indeed "belongs" in a homeless shelter? But Rightmer had to agree with them.
Sharon "Sheri" Reinhard Rightmer attended Bakersfield High School, and would have graduated with the class of 1975 if she'd stayed in school. She says physical abuse in her childhood home contributed to her problems, and she brought associated issues with her into adulthood.
But outwardly she did all right, landing in Beverly Hills, where she worked as a technician in an orthopedic surgeon's office, wrapping casts on celebrity knees and ankles. "Elizabeth Taylor, Danny Kaye, Howie Long," she boasts. "I love Howie Long."
She married Jerry Rightmer, who played bass and contributed backing vocals in the Sanford-Townsend Band (which had a 1977 hit, "Smoke from a Distant Fire"). When things cooled for the band, Jerry Rightmer put his computer savvy and entertainment business connections together, starting a company that developed multi-camera digital video assist software for the film industry.
"We had a blast," Rightmer says.
Jerry died of Hepatitis C in 2007. Rightmer, without the technical skills to keep the business afloat, lost her income, lost her house, lost her direction.
She doesn't have a lot to say about the next two years. Suffice to say things went badly. She sofa-surfed for a while, lived with relatives in Bakersfield and slept in her car. Then, four months ago, when it all got to be too much, she found herself standing outside the blue metal gates of the homeless shelter. "The truth was that was where I chose to be, and I had no one else to blame but myself," she says.
She was never the typical shelter client. She's a vegetarian, which did not always work well with the shelter's dinner menu. She kept her computer at a friend's house, so she was able to maintain contacts she might not otherwise have had. And, despite her sudden poverty, she had a few months left on her membership at the Body Exchange, where, somewhat incongruously, she continued to work out (and shower). But otherwise her routine was very much like that of her shelter-mates.
And then a funny thing happened. Stripped to her barest self, she remembered who she was. "Suddenly I saw this place as more than somewhere to lay my head," she says. "I saw it as a place to heal and face my painful past." She had found sanctuary.
Homeless Center director Louis Gill said he could see Rightmer gradually finding herself.
"She'd been through some challenging stuff, but crisis does things to a lot of people," he says. "She took a look at herself and her life and she said, 'I want something different.' When you talk to her, you can see she's definitely at peace. We all struggle to find that. She found it by living in a shelter."
Rightmer moved out of the homeless center earlier this month, getting her own apartment in southwest Bakersfield, but she resolved to remain an advocate.
Rightmer, who's already doing some motivational speaking, hopes to break down misunderstandings about homelessness so people can help without apprehension. "This is how I pay forward," she says.
The shelter, she says, needs food from restaurants, grocers and assorted events. Ice is precious. Fans are golden, especially when 100-degree days render the swamp cooler useless. Baby formula, plus-size women's clothes, bus passes, job referrals. And the gift of esteem-building: "It would be nice to have a beauty day," Rightmer says. "There is nothing worse then trying to look good for work and you have nothing to (help yourself)."
And, of course, monetary help.
"When people donate monetarily, they're not just buying a plate of food for somebody," she says. "They're donating to a life. And you can't put a monetary value on that."
Reach her at Shari@Rightmer-Digital.com.
E-mail Robert Price at rprice@bakersfield.com or www.stubblebuzz.com.
