The Selling of Karen Sorbo

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.”