"When you share..."

From the Desk of Amy Friedman

POPS the Club Executive Director and Co-Founder

Greetings!

“POPS is so accepting. Everyone’s welcoming. If it weren’t for POPS and Miss Gromala, I don’t think I’d be who I am today.”

That’s what Santa Monica High senior Holly Capps told me as we sat over coffees and talked about her traumatic childhood and her life today. I often feel shy asking students to talk about their lives, but when I asked if Holly would tell me her story, she said she would be honored. POPS, she says, means the world to her. She wants donors to know how much their gifts mean to her and every other POPS student she knows.

The “Miss Gromala” Holly credits with so much of what has gone right in her life is Annette Gromala, the POPS sponsor and English teacher who introduced Holly to POPS when the club launched at Santa Monica High in the fall of 2017. Holly quickly became a club leader. I’d met Holly once, and then, last May, I was so moved by her reading at the book launch for POPS anthology, In the Key of Love , I wanted to know more about her.

Holly is outgoing and wise beyond her years. She is also open, generous, articulate and insightful. She describes her family as having been “always broken.” Although she loves her parents, her dad was absent for much of her life in part because his son, Holly’s half-brother who is 16 years her senior, struggles with mental illness and has been incarcerated and homeless and her father was often busy taking care of him. Her parents separated when she was young and life with her mother was chaotic and difficult. From the start, Holly says she was a loner—at home and in school. She was bullied and neglected in elementary school, sexually assaulted at age 12 by a high school senior, and shamed as a result—by students and teachers alike.

“Theater saved me,” she says. When she and her mother moved to Burbank, she became “a theater kid.” Still, she struggled at home and in school. When she was 14 and attempted suicide, instead of offering support, her mother was angry, and Holly felt that no one cared about her.

That is part of what makes POPS so important to her. One day when she was still 14, her mother attacked her, and in her anguish and fear, Holly called first her father and then the police. She watched in sorrow as her mother was arrested. “I’m so glad my dad came to get me or I would have gone to foster care,” she says.

But moving to her dad’s meant moving in the middle of her freshman year to Santa Monica where she knew no one and where there was no theater program. Again she found herself feeling like an outcast. A counselor at SamoHi gave her a Renaissance Award in her sophomore year, and then there was her English teacher in 10 ^th grade honors, Ms. Gromala, who welcomed her with an open door and an open heart and influenced a new love for poetry. “It was the best English class ever, and now I’m her TA and I’m seeing that I’m just as tough grading kids as she is! But she pulled me out of a hard place. And when she told me about POPS, I knew I had to be there.”

In POPS, with the support of volunteers Claire LaZebnik, Christy Hobart, Victoria Andahazy, in addition to Ms. Gromala, Holly began to share her story and discovered, she says, “When you share, a weight lifts and people around you begin to have new respect for you. Now I just want to strengthen and grow Santa Monica POPS and help in every way I can.”

Thank you for helping to support POPS and young, resilient women like Holly Capps.

With gratitude,

Amy Friedman

Co-Founder & Executive Director

P.O. Box 10461

Marina Del Rey, CA 90295

310-709-2484

info@popstheclub.com

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