No one expected Sandy to become a celebrity, but then the media storm hit.

No one would pick Sandy as a candidate for fame.   Mild, meek and rather matronly, she seemed like your typical forgettable clock puncher.   By 9:00 a.m. every day she would be at her supermarket cash register greeting customers with a coy little smile as she uttered the company-required line, “Good morning. Find everything you wanted?”

Given her rather frumpy dress, no one would see her and think “sex object” or proponent of militant feminism.   Her loose fitting clothing was only a few threads away from the body-covering burkas so popular in the Middle East.   Yet through a quirk of fate, she became an international celebrity to millions of women who were simply fed up with the conventional male-female relationship.  

It all began innocently enough when punky-looking Francesca started bagging groceries for Sandy’s customers.   Looking at Francesca’s nose ring and pink-streaked hair you wouldn’t think they had much in common, but boredom tends to fill itself with conversation. In one of their brief exchanges about men, Francesca asked, “How long have you been married?”

“Over twenty years,” Sandy answered.  

“What’s your secret?”

“I guess I just try to make him feel special and we often play little games?”

“Like cards?”

“No,” she said with a twinkle, “little bedroom games.”

“Really, like what?”

“Oh, we have one we call ‘The Box’,” Sandy said in a low voice.

“The box?”

“Oh, yeah,” Sandy answered with a wicked little grin, “he pretends he’s visiting a naughty place and he has to put money in my bedroom box before we do it.”

“You’re kidding,” Francesca said with an embarrassed giggle.   Clearly, she didn’t expect her co-worker to live such a secret life.

“Actually, I’m not.   He makes a lot more than I do so I think it’s only fair for him to give me a little extra spending money without me having to ask all the time.   I call it my fun money.”

Francesca laughed at the story about the box and really didn’t think any more about it until, through an odd academic confluence, her media teacher gave her class an assignment to develop a piece for You Tube.   It had to be a first person video story of their thoughts on something they had read or heard about.   This project happened to come at the same time as her feminist studies’ teacher started a unit on the “historical suppression of women through economic subjugation”.   And voila! Francesca decided to share her interpretation of   Sandy’s little box.   She decided the little wooden box  ranked right up there with Blacks calling for monetary reparations from slavery, or American Indians demanding economic revenge by extracting millions of dollars from poor whites at the gambling casinos.

As a piece of quality video, it sucked.   Francesca just told her interpretation of her co-worker’s box story in front of the little camera perched on top of her computer, captured the video and posted it on YouTube.  For a while, it remained hidden in the web’s garbage heap of teenage confessions, but someone saw it and sent a link to the Top Teen Blogs site and through classic viral marketing, the web “hits” exploded.   Daughters showed it to their mothers who weren’t “YouTubers”.   Even though these women were older, they found Francesca’s polemic insightful.   They told their friends and YouTube was introduced to a whole new audience that could barely handle email.   Then some young staff member showed it to Oprah, who decided to invite Francesca on, show the clip and have a few feminist writers debate whether the “Box” represented oppression or liberation.  

By the time the media wildfire started, Francesca had quit her supermarket job and graduated from the community college, and Sandy, who didn’t even have a computer, didn’t know the public was hearing the web story of her bedroom intimacy.   She should have suspected something when a photographer stepped in front of her as she was leaving her supermarket shift.   

“What are you doing?” she asked with a startled expression.

“Oh, just getting some shots of the front of the store for an ad agency,” he answered.

She never guessed this would be the picture seen round the world when the  media tsunami hit and made both her and the bedroom box famous.   If she had only known Francesca had done the YouTube piece, she would have at least asked her to use a pseudonym and not her real name.   Of course, Francesca never took a law course so she didn’t know she shouldn’t use Sandy’s real name.

As folk heroes go Sandy wasn’t prepared for the attention.   She never wore much makeup or nice clothes to work, but on the day of the publicity storm, she looked even frumpier than usual.   She had just barely combed her hair and her wardrobe didn’t stand out either.   Her slightly mismatched plaid skirt and paisley patterned chartreuse sweater would have given the Queer Eye guys a makeover orgasm.

When Sandy’s picture showed up in the Star on the tabloid rack located just before her register, all hell broke loose at her check out stand.   The word got out that SHE was the woman on the front page and long lines formed behind her. This only slowed down the line, but on the following day Oprah broadcast her story and her checkout line snaked all the way back to the dairy section.   It barely moved at a snail’s pace, because women lined up with only a few items in their baskets.   They didn’t want a quick scan; they wanted advice about their relationships.   They often asked the question, “Should I get a box and how much should he put in?”   Management decided this was not good for business and they transferred Sandy to a less visible position stocking shelves.  

As with any media wildfire, Sandy’s moment in the spotlight didn’t really last that long.   After the initial rush of reporters staking out the store and her house, the tabloids and talk shows shifted attention to a new story of how celebrities in Hollywood were using a new seaweed diet to cure Aids.

The Box story did change her life.   Sitting beside her bed, it never made very much; just a little “fun money” for an occasional novel, movie or dinner with her girlfriend.    But when a group of high-powered marketers offered an endorsement deal if she would let them market a bedroom box with her name on it, she decided to go for it.  To capitalize on her story, they quickly imported some Chinese-made boxes with a little slot in the top and marketed them as “ Sandy’s Bedroom Box”.

They even paid some copywriter to slap together a little booklet to go with it.   “ Sandy’s Bedroom Wisdom” came packaged inside the Box and Reader’s Digest, constantly struggling for an edgier market, published her marital tips.   The box package never became a high end item because it didn’t sell very well at the upscale stores, but Wal-Mart couldn’t keep it in stock.

In the end, the actual bedroom contributions from her husband weren’t enough to fund Sandy’s retirement, but the endorsement income enabled her to quit her supermarket job.   At first her husband was angry about the exposure of their secret, but then as the money poured in, he accepted it and decided join her in retirement.   It even allowed them to travel until he had a fatal heart attack on their Antarctic cruise.

For years she kept the box by her bed and they continued to play their little game.   But after her husband passed away, she moved the original box out of the bedroom and retired it to her living room mantle.   Now she keeps her late husband’s ashes in it. So in the end, he did make a significant deposit.

Copyright 2007 Sam Love