Orange County Register Article - 05/16/08

LAKE FOREST, CA -- Friday's edition of the Orange County Register featured an article on Yesenia's Dream Dress Drive naming key persons involved including Nina Herzog, Michael Repper, Deidre Spicer, and Jonathan Formica. The Article was also released last night on at http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/life/themorningread/article_2044284.php the text from the article follows:

Woman's death inspires biggest prom dress drive
By LORI BASHEDA

Every now and again we hear an inspirational story about someone who was making a difference in the world when their life was cut short. Most of us are content to do nothing more with the story than pass it on. Others aren't. Plain and simple.

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Nina Herzog gets herself out of bed in San Bernardino County at 4 a.m. weekday mornings so she can board a train that will take her to Santa Ana, where she then catches a bus to the Orange County High School of the Arts.

The 17-year-old junior is an honors student and president of the Student Body Congress. She sings, dances and acts in school musicals. She is a member of several community service clubs, not to mention the National Thespian Society and Debate Club. And she says things like: "A lot of girls are sitting around reading Teen People, but it's so much more rewarding to (help others)."

Last fall, as if she didn't have enough to do, she founded the school's environmental club: the Green School Effect. The club immediately banned Styrofoam from the cafeteria and began selling reusable plastic water bottles with the club logo.
In November, Nina presented fellow members with another brainstorm: recycling prom dresses. Not only would club members save the earth from being clogged with useless gowns, but they would help out girls who might miss this All-American rite of passage because they couldn't afford a dress.

Club members greeted the idea with enthusiasm, Nina remembers. "Everyone was like, 'Oh, God, that's true, I have like a zillion dresses in my closet that I'm never gonna use.'"
The only thing they needed to figure out was how to get the dresses to the girls who needed them.

Deidre Spicer was at the club meeting that day. Deidre, 47, teaches advanced placement literature and composition. She's also faculty adviser for the Green Club.
As chance would have it, a few days later she stopped in at Santa Ana Flower World on 17th and Main several blocks from the high school. Tacked to a bulletin board, she noticed, was an index card asking for prom dresses for Santa Ana high school girls.
Deidre walked up to the woman at the counter and introduced herself.
Yesenia Orozco said she was the manager of the flower shop, which was owned by her parents. She was 26, pretty and vivacious. She had earlier that year returned from a trip to Ecuador where she helped disadvantaged children, she told Deidre. And now she wanted to do something for kids here. Joining forces with the high school club would be amazing, she said. Yesenia took Deidre's phone number and promised to call.
Deidre returned to school and told Nina about Yesenia. "You have to meet her," she said, adding they were cut from the same cloth. Nina reported back to the club that the collection was going to be even bigger than they thought. She was thrilled and awaited Yesenia's call.

But the weeks slipped by and the call never came.

By the time students returned from winter break, Nina figured Yesenia must have lost interest in the prom dress drive. She called some Santa Ana high schools, leaving messages with student body presidents, to try and get things moving herself.
But not one called her back.

In late January, Deidre got an emotional call from Yesenia's mother, Elizabeth: Yesenia had been killed in a crash. A friend had been driving Yesenia home to Mission Viejo, where she lived with her parents, on Dec. 16 when she lost control of her car. The friend allegedly had been drinking.

The one thing Yesenia was really looking forward to before she died, Elizabeth told Deidre, was working on the prom dress drive with the high school club. Elizabeth had searched her daughter's belongings to find Deidre's phone number. "It was my daughter's dream … and if you guys are still willing to come along I would love to work with you."

Deidre gave Elizabeth an e-mail for Nina. "I would love to meet you," Elizabeth told Nina. "My daughter never got the chance."

Elizabeth showed up at the high school the next day with a photo album. Inside were pictures of Yesenia graduating from Santa Margarita Catholic High School in 1999, arm in arm with her mother, carrying grain in Ecuador, surrounded by children.

"She was everything I admire in a person," Nina says. "I was so disappointed she wasn't in the room."

When Elizabeth left, Nina ran down the hall to the school's film and television studio and grabbed two friends who worked there. She told them what was going on, pitching the story for the Art Attack, an 8-12 minute student-run campus TV news program broadcast each morning in classrooms throughout the school.

That was a Monday. The next day, Nina did a live interview on Art Attack. By the time Elizabeth returned to the high school for the club's Thursday afternoon meeting, everyone knew about Yesenia's Dream Dress Drive, which is what it was now being called.
Nearly 100 kids packed the classroom. Elizabeth talked about her daughter. Some students cried. After the meeting, Art Attack producer Jonathan Formica and technical director Michael Repper videotaped Nina, Deidre and Elizabeth. They spent spring break editing the video and posting it on a Web site, dreamdressdrive.com.

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When school started again, the video was broadcast on Art Attack. They expected to get some dresses.

They didn't expect 350.

"They didn't just bring the dress, they brought the matching shoes and little handbags and jewelry," Deidre said, adding that many of the dresses still had tags.

"It affirmed my feeling that humans are good."

Across town, Elizabeth was collecting another 350 dresses from her church, Saddleback Church in Lake Forest. She also connected with Santa Ana schools with the help of state Sen. Lou Correa, (D-Santa Ana) for whom her daughter had interned while attending Chapman University.

Girls are encouraged to fill out applications to receive a dress and then return the gown after prom so other girls can use it next year in the true spirit of recycling. Some of the dresses have already been worn by girls who had prom last weekend. Nina has already attended her prom, but other proms are slated to be held over the next few weeks.
Elizabeth says her daughter would be beaming if she could see it all.

"My mind was in a fog," she says of the days after Yesenia's death.

"But I remembered so clearly that she wanted to do this. How badly she wanted to help them. If you could have only seen her face … She was glowing. That's what keeps me going to this day."

Nina is beaming too.

"It says something … that when somebody leaves your life they don't have to be gone forever," she says. "I think it's a really beautiful thing … that we're going to carry her dream on and do her unfinished work."

Plain and simple.

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