Spring Break 2013 may have come and gone, but the memories will last forever. That’s why I’ve created this series, Spring Break Revisited, so I can celebrate great moments in America’s greatest month-long religious holiday. This week’s edition takes us to swingin’ Panama City Beach, Florida and one woman’s amazing, brave battle with vertigo.
Doctors always told Champayne Rose Jenkins that life was going to be tougher for her than for other girls. As a child, she’d suffered from severe vertigo that left her unable to walk without having to grip rails or walls, and she spent all of her spare time in physical therapy while the other kids were out playing Hide N Seek and league Quidditch. “Things will change,” she always told herself, as she clung to her silly dream of becoming a professional dancer.
Change, things did. In her freshman year of high school, Champayne made the JV cheer squad after attending Spirit Camp three years in a row. Sure, she couldn’t participate in flips, tumble or even wave pom-poms without getting dizzy, but nobody stood to the side and clapped like she did. And then the day finally came that she was declared “Okay, I guess” by her doctor, so when she left for college at Western Kentucky that summer, she had the confidence of a million women who didn’t need bed rails.
After Champayne was offered a bid to her seventh choice sorority during the mandatory spring rush for chapters that failed to meet recruiting quotas, she immediately signed up for the Kappa Sig Krazy Koed Spring Break Karavan with her favorite new sisters. This year’s destination was Panama City Beach, and Champayne hadn’t been to Florida since she was three, when she visited a therapist in Tallahassee while her parents met up with some friends at a swingers colony.
Free of parents and a crippling fear of movement, Champayne and the girls were ready to get their drink on and try out their special Spring Break fake identities. On the first day, Champayne met some cool Pi Kapps from Iowa State, and she told them her name was Tiff and she was a choreography major at the Brooklyn Academy of Dance. “Whoa, you’re a dancer,” a 5-foot steroid user named “Hung Chad” asked her between shots. “You should totally enter the Wet N Wild White T-Shirt Lap Dance contest for a $25 bar tab and Girls Gone Wild audition,” he urged her.
“Yeah, maybe I will,” Champayne said with a confidence she’d never quite felt before. So she signed up for that contest, and when her name was called, she hit that stage with infectious energy. That is, until the vertigo came rushing back.
Where Are They Now: Champayne failed out of school because she couldn’t leave her dorm room to go to classes, so she moved home and became a shut-in. After three years of treatment, though, she once again overcame her affliction, and she eventually married her gynecologist, who turned out to be a fraud.
