The Selling of Karen Sorbo

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.