Thursday, April 12, 2012

Bern, Baby, Bern!

My New York buddy Bernadett Vajda was back in town tonight, rocking the house at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, speaking to a roomful of women and men about being proud of who you are.Yes, I do know a New York supermodel, and she's a stunner in person, not just on film. A seasoned veteran of the New York talk show circuit and national and international fashion magazines, Bernadett and I used to work together at Congressman Marty Meehan's office.

Here's a group of Team Meehan alum, who helped filled the room for Bern's speech.Mothers and daughters, a powerful theme of the night, featured Bernadett and her mother, Klara, and her friend Barbara O'Neil, with her mom and my favoritest Aunt in the world, Helen O'NeilBern and some more members of Team MCC, Colleen and MariaBernadett, she of the incredible Hungarian cookie recipes, is now a model with Wilhemina models in New York and an image consultant, and has carved out quite a niche for herself in the wild world of fashion. Besides the work she does helping lead her non-profit, Curves for Change (http://www.curvesforchange.com/) Bern also does some side work posing families for Christmas card pictures.

She can't help but drop names of some of the celebs she's rubbed shoulders with *cough* Justin Beiber *cough* but truth be told, at six feet two inches tall in her heels, they probably weren't really rubbing shoulders.


Bern followed a pair of incredible stories of self-confidence from a pair of female students at UML, and then launched into her own journey, a trip that was seriously sidelined when her father was murdered in 1999.


In an emotion-packed conversation, Bern passionately told the women in the room to be proud of their bodies, not to shy away from who they are, and what they really want to do with their lives.Sadly, in the anecdotes of her life-shaping moments, she neglected to include the stories of our wild and violent battles with the Sock'em Bop'em inflatable swords in Meehan's office, but those of us who were there can never forget.

She closed out the night with a kiss for her biggest fan and supporter, her momShe's come a long way from her days of show-and-tell presentations when her toughest question were "what kind of things do they have in Hungary," but we're all super proud of her. Take a peek at her work at http://www.bernadett.net/

1 comment:

bernadett said...

Oh PATRICK COOK!!! My heart couldn't handle all the love from you all. Thank you for coming out tonight.
xo
Bernadett