The Selling of Karen Sorbo

Karen Sorbo’s alto glides over the ballroom, shifting from a chant to a melisma of numbers and then down into glissades of basso profundo. Sometimes she’ll break into song. She raises her arm. “You’ve got to giiiive a little/taaaaake a little . . . ” She stops midline to interject a schoolmarm’s chide: “Oh, don’t look at her! Just bid!” You can see her feline smile from the worst table in the back of the hall.

Sorbo is a petite blond in high heels holding a wireless microphone. She has perfect white teeth. She moves with the measured elegance of one of the show room girls on The Price Is Right. The energy of the room rises to meet hers the moment she’s introduced; she’s beaming, delighted to have everybody’s attention. She’s perfectly made up for the stage, with burgundy swoops highlighting her prominent cheekbones; her corn silk hair is swept away from her face and hangs down to her shoulders, allowing her an unimpeded clear blue gaze at her adoring public. She’s wearing a tasteful red sequined jacket.

She wades into the crowd like a charismatic preacher—or like Wayne Newton working the room in Vegas. But don’t let the ice sculptures at the bar, high hotel ceilings, white tablecloths, and waiters with their silver coffeepots and crystal glassware fool you. This isn’t another fancy wedding. It’s another fancy charity auction, and the tables are full of egos in black tie sitting next to $3,000 designer gowns. They have come with their checkbooks, as they do every weekend, but they expect to be convinced. Nay, to be entertained: They expect Sorbo to transform a silly, almost cynical exercise—rich people bidding against each other for luxuries that they all can afford—into an extravaganza, into a gala. They expect that beautiful alto to flatter or seduce or cajole them by appealing to their magnanimous generosity or poking their tender areas of psychological guilt.

Sorbo works almost ninety of these events a year. Not just here either—she’s becoming popular nationally too. Like a successful country singer who’s crossed over to a mainstream audience, she’s taken the down-home drone of the farm auctioneer—“HerewegonowwoodygettwoandahalffivesevenandahalfTEN. WoodygettwelveandahalfFIFTEEN”—and made it, somehow, palatable to the elite.

She’s a bona fide celebrity in local charity circles, graciously outshining whichever well-coifed news anchor emcee she’s working alongside, always flattering whichever high-powered politician or CEO by joking with them as if it were a Dean Martin roast and everybody’s in on it. That voice of hers has squeezed a room full of high society like this—people she now considers to be her friends—for $500,000 in under half an hour. By her count, in her thirteen years as an auctioneer she’s raised more than $52 million for organizations and events, including the AIDS Foundation, Children’s Home Society, Coalition for Battered Women, Guthrie Theater Gala, Harmon Killebrew Invitational, March of Dimes, Minnesota Zoo, the Pacer Benefit, The Smile Network International, Lupus Foundation, United Way, and The Wishes and More Campaign.

Still, for Sorbo, it’s never really enough. Because the entire time she’s onstage she can hear Daddy’s voice, stern and unsatisfied, in her head. “You’ll never make it,” the voice says. 

After every event, she goes home exhausted.
Sorbo’s late father, Kermit Anderson, was a brilliant mechanical engineer with a degree from the University of Chicago. He invented one of the first microfiche machines, but when another company won the patent, the Andersons lost everything. All three of Kermit’s kids—two older boys and little Karen—had to work. His wife, Adella, worked as a private duty nurse for a family that traveled south for the winter, and she went with them. Kermit did anything he could to excavate the family from his financial miscalculation. He installed artificial fireplaces for Montgomery Ward. He did odd jobs on farms around the family home in Delano. And he bought antiques at auctions and restored them for resale. 

Kermit, his family says, was tough on his kids. Mean, even. Goddamn never going to make it goddamn don’t work hard enough goddamnit. He seemingly knew everything—but he was too impatient, too much of a perfectionist, to teach.

One of Karen’s few positive memories of her father was tagging along with him to farm auctions. She was enthralled by the auctioneer’s chant. “He took me to my first auction when I was three,” she says. “I would sit there and watch this guy with a cowboy hat and a big belt buckle, big enough that you could serve a turkey dinner on it. He would do the ‘Herewegonowgonnagetfiveandahalfsevenandahalf,’ and I just loved it. Many, many years later, and I’ve always had it in my blood.”

Watching Sorbo at the podium, with the poise of a beauty queen, it’s hard to believe that she was ever self-conscious about being the hick from the sticks with a belt on which you could serve a turkey dinner. She says it took a lot of work to transform herself into the woman she is now—well, into a woman at all, really.

When she talks about herself, her voice drops into a conspiratorial tone, as though she’s gossiping about someone else. Almost as if she doesn’t believe any of this happened; as if it were preposterous. Her story nearly is. She grew up, she says, as a tomboy—a big, square-shouldered girl who worked and played with the boys. She never wore makeup. Never wore a bra. Never dated. Never smoked or drank, for that matter. But  she could clean and jerk her weight, 160 pounds. She could build a tree house. She rode Brahma bulls. She mud wrestled. Her one feminine concession was being a waitress at Perkins, but that was just to save enough money to buy a 444-barrel ’68 Mustang. After school, she says, she would swap engine tips and change oil when she wasn’t whipping 360s in the school parking lot or cruising down Mainstreet in Hopkins. Sometimes, she would go to the Shakopee Speedway and race her brother’s Delta ’88 on the figure-eight circuit.

Karen’s mother says that at the time she regretted being away from her kids when they were growing up. She says she knew how hard her husband was on her children, but she ignored it out of loyalty to a man whose pride had been wounded. “But at the same time,” she says, “I always thought Karen would be fine. She was so capable.”

Despite what her mother refers to as Karen’s “Amazon woman” persona, Karen was shy growing up, extremely insecure, and lonely. “Karen always wanted to help people,” her mother remembers. Her first charitable interest was rescuing prostitutes on Hennepin Avenue. Karen’s family was Lutheran, but in high school she started getting “really churchy,” perhaps in response to serious health problems she had in middle school, when she suffered from a debilitating kidney disease (her medical records at the University of Minnesota read “miraculous recovery”). Out of her wheelchair, she started attending services by herself at Soul’s Harbor, a Pentecostal–Evangelical church located in an old hotel on the corner of Washington and Hennepin. It was during the 1970s, and downtown was teeming with prostitutes, often lost young girls from the Iron Range. Sorbo would help try to get the girls off the street, cleaned up, and back on the right track. “My father would always tell me, ‘You can’t save the world, Karen.’ ”          

The only other place she found fulfillment was in music: She was the first-chair horn player at Minnehaha Academy, which she attended on a scholarship, and on the weekends she played with her brothers in the church band and sang in the choir at Soul’s Harbor. When she wasn’t making music herself, she would listen to the gospel choir at a Southern Methodist church on the North Side. “I’ve always had music in my heart,” she says. At one point, she believed she would devote her life to it—she studied music in college and supported herself immediately after graduation by giving private lessons.

After high school graduation from Minnehaha Academy, Karen might have continued on the evangelical path if, she says, the church hadn’t rejected her. She applied to Oral Roberts University, where, as a high school student, she had attended a summer music program, but says she was not accepted because she exceeded the school’s weight guidelines. She went to Azusa Pacific College, a hard-core Christian school in California, and earned a “music certification to teach privately” but the damage was done. “I still love to sing hymns, but I don’t go to church anymore,” she says. She laughs. “I’ve gone to church so much I feel like I’ve made up for it.”

In 1982, after leaving Azusa, Karen married Al Sorbo. “I didn’t date, but my friend was dating this model who worked downtown at Dayton’s, Kevin Sorbo”—yes, that Kevin Sorbo, who played Hercules on TV—“so my girlfriend and Kevin set me up with Kevin’s older brother, Al.” Al was a quiet, introverted actuary—a man very much like Karen’s father. In fact, Kermit approved of Al, as enthusiastically as he’d approved of anything that Karen had ever done. So she married the actuary her father loved and immediately started a family with him. Karen traded in her ’68 Mustang for a late-model Chrysler minivan with wood paneling. After her two children were born, she started putting on weight—and at only five-feet-four ballooned to 230 pounds.

“I hated myself. That’s why I was fat,” she says. “I would eat and not take care of myself. I was a victim. I was so angry at my father, but I was the one who was suffering and he wasn’t. If you don’t forgive someone, you’re the one that’s suffering. No matter how much they hurt you. No matter how much they say or do—I made myself the victim.”

Through a conscious decision to forgive her father and to eat more sensibly, Sorbo lost the excess weight. But it wasn’t enough. She hired Cheryl Moore Brinkley, a private voice and performance instructor, to work with her on diction and voice. She took classes on presentation at Hennepin Technical College, learning posture (“there’s a plumb line hanging from the top of your head to your toes”) and how to walk like a lady (“thigh, knee, calf.”)

In 1991, Karen Sorbo, former über tomboy, became Mrs. Minnesota International. Though she’s self-conscious about the title now—“I don’t want to be known as a beauty queen”—she entered the pageant as both a career move and a last gambit to keep her family together. “I figured I would save my marriage because then my husband would be seen with me and we would be a family,” she explains.

Her marriage eventually fell apart, but winning Mrs. Minnesota did help her career: She became a motivational speaker. “I needed that title to get in the door,” she says. “I wanted to talk about forgiveness. To tell audiences of women that you can do it. That weight loss is hard, but that you can transform your life with forgiveness.” She made more than 200 speaking engagements that year, and as she continued to build confidence, she started thinking about continuing a public life after her reign.

Remembering the public speakers that thrilled her as a little girl, Sorbo decided to go to auctioneering school. In 1993, she graduated from Missouri Auction school in Kansas City with plans to open a consignment auction house in St. Louis Park with her father and a brother. They had a building picked out, on I–394 and Louisiana, but her father got sick—lupus, then cancer—and the consignment plan was scuttled. Karen’s husband was on the road nearly all the time, leaving her at home with the two kids. The couple divorced in 2001.

Sorbo was virtually a single mom in a man’s world. When she graduated from auction school, she was one of five women in a class of 195. “Auctioneering is a very family-oriented profession,” she says. “You’re usually born into an auction family, a family that sells farm equipment, industrial machinery, real estate, antiques. And if you’re really good in front of people, you’ll become an auctioneer. And if you’re a girl, you’ll start as a clerk.”
Apart from the good ol’ boy ceiling, there really wasn’t a career in charitable auctioneering at the time. Charity fundraising is often about social networking, attending parties, and making connections that will be useful when you go back to the office on Monday morning. Sorbo explains that it was no different for auctioneers. “Maybe two or three times a year, an auctioneer who did estate sales would get called by the Diabetes Society or the American Cancer Society, and somebody would ask, ‘Hey, Joe, do you want to donate your services to the cancer event coming up?’ So they would dress up their wife and come sit with the who’s who in town. And then, when somebody who was at the event lost their father or lost their farm, they would inevitably ask, ‘Hey, who was that auctioneer at that event?’ ”

Sorbo made her own breaks. She got her first auction gig (a golf tourney for diabetes) on the strength of a Star Tribune article (FORMER MRS. MINNESOTA GRADUATES FROM AUCTIONEER SCHOOL). Her first year, she donated her services to fifty-six auctions. “I truly believe if you have a passion for something, money is going to follow,” she says. “I never got into this to make money, and I just decided to get up and learn and I wouldn’t get paid for learning. And I made many, many mistakes.”

Some of those mistakes were straight out of a sitcom, such as pointing out, at a Jewish event, how a fur coat would make a wonderful Christmas present or, at a dry auction, employing her trademark “Take another sip of wine” tease. But most of her early faux pas resulted from misreading the vicissitude of a room filled with money and power. “The most common mistakes happen when I’ve called somebody by their name and they didn’t want to be known,” she says. “I can’t win in this line of work. Some events, if I don’t recognize someone, I get criticized. Some, if I do recognize someone, I get criticized. I’ve lost events this way. So I’ve learned to read people’s body language.”

For Sorbo, becoming a girly girl has been a challenging transition, especially so late in life, and especially when every weekend seems like an opportunity for Cinderella to revert back to pumpkinhood in the middle of the ball. Onstage, Sorbo uses her feminine wiles to play men against women (“They’re cheering for you, Sue! Just do it!”) and table against table (“Oh, if you have the money—get it done! It’s not even a tax write-off yet!”). She counsels her charity clients to put the tennis bracelet on the block after the Masters tickets—using a husband’s guilt as a market strategy. At the same time, she treads lightly with the wives—as the blond with the mike, she realizes the attention isn’t always positive. “I want the ladies out there to like me so much,” she says. Her voice is sweetest when addressing her female bidders.

From the beginning of her auction career, Sorbo has been vigilant about the sartorial messages she sends. In fact, she says she only started charging because her dry cleaning bills were getting too high. “All of a sudden, I had a slew of people in the crowd looking at me, and I didn’t want to look like I was coming from the farm,” she says. Her bills for makeup, nails, and hair grew exponentially as she booked bigger gigs. “I went from selling $10,000 auctions to selling $100,000,” she says. “There’s a different league of people there. I had to crank it up a bit. I had to become more presentable. And I realized that was going to cost money.”

She noticed that the smallest changes in personal style would affect her business. “In 1996, I cut my hair twelve inches and I booked 80 percent more auctions,” she says. “I went from long hair that was a little too flamboyant to news anchor hair. That was my career boost. But in 2000, I decided to grow my hair again. To heck with it! I’d earned it.”

Sorbo still struggles with her weight, but she’s gained perspective. “I’m supposed to be a little size two. But I go, ‘I am who I am today. I can’t lose any more weight.’ I got a thing up in my head. I’m not going to be 120. I’m going to be, you know, my 125 and not worry about that fifteen pounds of television weight. The heck with it! I’ve just about had it.” She laughs. “I am who I am, and I’m confident that people don’t like me because of that. I always am professional. I’ve never been told I look sexy up onstage. They like me because I make them money, not because of how I look.”

It’s not just the job that makes her transformation challenging. Sorbo says that she hasn’t retained many of her old friends since she lost all her weight and learned how to walk like a lady. “People just treat you a little differently once you have a certain amount of success,” she says. She does stay in touch with Jill Glass, one of her old friends from Delano. Jill’s mother used to teach the girls and their brothers in high school choir. A single mother herself, Jill believes Sorbo learned from her experiences and is proud of her friend’s determination to make a difference. “Karen is the true example of getting better, not bitter,” she says.
Glass says Sorbo has retained her tomboy energy. They share a love for the blues, and once in a while go dancing at the Minnesota Music Café. Sorbo loves to fish (“I would rather go fishing than go on a fancy vacation to the Greek Isles”) and is still a gear head. After her divorce, she bought a 1750cc custom soft-tail Harley. The bike is lavender, pink, and green.

Other auctioneers are effusive in their praise of Sorbo—maybe because she has bookings into 2009. Brent Lawrence, a charity auctioneer who refers to Sorbo as a mentor, credits her success to her ability to read the crowd in order to maximize contributions. “She has the auctioneer chant that’s pleasing to listen to,” says Lawrence, “but what sets her apart is the amount of hard work she puts into her research of the charities. When she does something for AIDS, she knows how many people die of AIDS every year. When she does something for Duchenne’s, she knows the disease affects boys and not girls.”

“We schedule our events around Karen,” says Kim Valentini of The Smile Network. “First, we call the venue, and then we call her. We won’t go without her.” Valentini believes that in addition to Sorbo’s beauty and that warm alto, she has an ability to connect with audiences in a way other auctioneers can’t. “She has a unique sincerity that comes through,” says Valentini. “And I don’t see other auctioneers leave the podium the way she does. Karen’s comfort level is with the people.” 

Kris Huson of the Children’s Home Society and Family Services calls Sorbo the “ultimate cheerleader.” “If there is power in female persuasion, Karen possesses a lioness’ share,” Huson says. “Through her wit she creates a friendly competition among peers and capitalizes on that dynamic. Winning bidders feel like they’ve won prizes bigger than the coveted auction item. They bask in Karen’s heartfelt kudos as she leads the crowd in validating applause.”

On the strength of her six-figure salary, Sorbo traded her minivan for a Jaguar XKR convertible. Her son and daughter, ages twenty-three and twenty-one, respectively, are in that quasi-independent stage. She lives in the penthouse of the Calhoun Beach Club towers, in a perfumed apartment crammed with traditional (and very girly) European antiques: There’s a French vanity in one corner and all sorts of cherubic statuary scattered throughout. The centerpiece is an 1886 Steinway, one of the first eighty-eight-key pianos ever built. (In order to prove her chops, she gives an impromptu concert, playing and singing a hymn by Andraé Crouch, “Jesus Is the Answer.”) She has an office in an adjoining room with two computers on a beautiful wooden desk. There are photos of her with Bill Cosby, Elton John, and Hulk Hogan, framed business magazine and newspaper articles attesting to her success. Here, in her well-appointed castle, it is clear that she’s the queen of charity auctioneering. But why is she the only one? Why haven’t more women followed her?

“I’ll tell you a little secret,” she says in the conspiratorial fashion she employs away from the gala events, especially when talking about herself. “It’s the voice. When you’re attractive, your voice is higher, because all your life you’ve been, well, you know. I haven’t been attractive all my life, OK? I was fat and very ugly. So when you’re fat and ugly as a little girl, you don’t care—your voice is down here. Now most women who are attractive at forty were attractive at five, ten, fifteen. They were the homecoming queens.

“In the public arena, their voice is usually high. But you can’t listen to an attractive woman during an auction for more than five minutes. Their voices are too high, and when you’re in front of people and you’re bid calling, it’s sing-songy. You have to be deeper. That’s why male auctioneers make it. Because their voices are deep and nice to listen to. It’s the resonance of the voice—though you don’t think about it. That’s why my voice works—it isn’t masculine, but it’s deep and it resonates. People say, ‘Well, there are a lot of women who can do it just like you, Karen. They’ve been news anchors. They have their diction and a little broadcasting.’ But when you’re up there, and you have to bring energy and excitement—well, when a woman gets excited, her voice goes up. Mine goes down.” 

Then she goes into her chant: “Twoandahalfmakeittwoseventyfivewoodygetthreewoodygetthreeandaquarterwoodygetthreeseventyfive . . . .”

Sold. 

Associate editor Steve Marsh wrote about vintage furniture dealer Steve Mogol in November.