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.