‘Girl Scout Nerd’ Grows Up, Overcomes Demons

Prize-winning Brownie followed meandering path to happiness as a Chicago Luvabull, published author

By Mary Schmich
Chicago Tribune

Before she went to Stanford, before she was a cheerleader for the Chicago Bulls and before all the rest, Erika Kendrick was Chicago’s Girl Scout cookie queen.

She was 9 the first time she won the crown, the first black girl in Chicago to be the top cookie-seller.

When she angled for her third straight title at age 11, I wrote a story about her, and every January when cookie season rolls around I wonder: Whatever happened to the cookie queen?

Here’s what:

She walks into the Willis Tower Corner Bakery in a hip-hugging black skirt and shiny black stiletto ankle boots.

Buried in her big black bag, under the red-and-white pompons she carries everywhere like charms, is a copy of her novel, “Appetite,” whose first page includes this:

“I whip my achy nakedness around to the crescendo of a bellowing snore. Yikes! A strange man is stretched out on the floor beside me entwined in half my sheet — clearly one of the puzzle pieces misplaced somewhere between the first Bacardi Mojito and last call’s obligatory double shot of Patron.”

This is not the geeky girl in braces I remember.

But at 35, Kendrick is still a Girl Scout. Really. Still pays dues. Teaches Girl Scouts. Says everything she needed to know in life — leadership, networking, teamwork — she learned as a Brownie.

“I’m a Girl Scout nerd,” she says. “Forever.”

Kendrick was visiting Chicago last week, and when I asked to meet, she suggested the tower she still calls Sears. As a girl, she loved to doodle it the way other girls sketch horses.

“This building,” she says, “oh my God, has always represented, ‘I gotta get the hell out of here.’ My mom or dad would take me, or we’d go on a field trip, and being up at the top was, ‘Oh my God, there’s so much out there.’ I lived in a house on the South Side, looked out at a tree.”

Kendrick did get out, but the trail, as she describes it over coffee, has been hilly.

St. Ignatius College Prep to Stanford. Stanford to a Chicago hospital on suicide watch, diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Back to Stanford. Graduation. Then another collapse, more therapy. Then a year as a Luvabull.

“Dancing breathed new life into me,” she says of her cheerleading days. “I thought, OK, I feel normal, whatever that means.”

She felt normal enough to earn an MBA at the University of Illinois. Then the sadness sucked her down again.

“I felt,” she says, “just very lost and empty.”

She drank too much, smoked too much pot and finally went through rehab.

“I don’t have an off switch,” she says, “whether it’s Haagen-Dazs or vodka.”

Then eight years ago, Kendrick moved to New York. The moment she first stepped out of the subway, she cried. She felt happy.

Her breakdowns had taught her that she was most vulnerable when she couldn’t express herself creatively. New York, she sensed, had energy big enough to match hers and would let her feel creative in a way no other place could.

So far, she says, it has.

Random House has published her two novels, “Confessions of a Rookie Cheerleader” and “Appetite.” She’s ready to embark on a college motivational speaking tour. Every other Saturday she teaches writing and self-esteem classes to Girl Scouts.

“I’m always working,” she says. “Unless I’m on a date. And even then I’m thinking about work.”

She also teaches seminars on dating.

“I love dating,” she says. “And then you’ve got banter for Friday night with martinis with your girlfriends: ‘He did what?’ ”

She says she no longer drinks, though. She eats no meat, meditates and plays basketball, all disciplines that, coupled with a creative life, have helped her manage her moods without medication.

“But that’s me,” she’s careful to say. “I don’t say meds are bad.”

In every success story, there’s a seed of trouble. In every story about trouble, there’s a seed of better times. The former cookie queen has lived both.

And as for cookies?

“At 35,” she says, “you’ve got to start watching the Samoas and Do-Si-Dos. But I sneak and eat them.”

She flings her arms out like a cheerleader.

“My favorites are still the thin mints. Oh. My. Goodness.”