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Spreading smiles: Suzann Castore, The A-OK Lady

Joe Heidenescher

Suzann Castore holds up a map of Ohio where she has highlighted every city she has visited during her travels.

Joe Heidenescher, Community Editor

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Despite her diminutive stature, she’s impossible to miss. When I met her outside of the bookstore, she was decked in a flowing red cape, a blue turtle neck, bright floral leggings and vibrant red rain boots. But what I first noticed was her tremendous smile and overflowing jubilee.

“You must be Joe,” she yelled as she spotted me with my coffee, recorder and my yellow legal pad.

“Can I give you a hug?” she asked.

I was taken aback. She was the first person I had ever interviewed in the past three years to offer me a hug. I obliged, because after all, she is the self-proclaimed goodwill ambassador of kindness in the state of Ohio.

She is Suzann Castore, otherwise known as the A-OK Lady.

It is her personal mission to travel across Ohio “to promote kindness, hope and compassion in our state with the ultimate goal that Ohio be a model to America.”

In the past few years, she traveled over 7,000 miles spreading smiles to Ohioans. Not only does she bring a smile to thousands of faces, she also hands out physical smiley faces to share. It’s all part of what she calls the “mile of smiles.” She encourages people she meets to take her around to homeless shelters, assisted living centers, college campuses and coffee shops or anywhere there are people that could use a smile.

Castore met me on campus to participate in one of her mile of smiles, so we left from the bookstore together. In addition to her outfit, she was geared up with a sack of smiley face pillows and a utility belt, with six pockets of surprise and wonder.

When we ran into students she would greet them with a bright smile and a question.

“Can I offer you an A-O-K?” she would ask.

Many looked at her confused; some would say “sure.”

She would then give them a riddle. “It’s something you’ve given and something you’ve received.”

“It’s a cute riddle,” she told me. “I kind of made that up; I don’t know where it came from. I guess my brain.”

When the students finally gave in, she would tell them. “Can I offer you an act of kindness?” she would say as she traced the letters A-O-K in the air.

Then she would introduce herself. “I’m Suzanne, the goodwill ambassador for kindness in Ohio. The A-OK Lady.”

She told me that she adopted her moniker after several events in her past.

Castore revealed to me that she has bipolar disorder. In her past, she was hospitalized because of her condition. She stayed in bed for weeks because she had no motivation to get better.

“My family began drifting away because I was in and out like a bouncing ball,” she said.

Eventually, she was able to spend time out of bed, but she still only sat around. One time she sat next to a schizophrenic man.

“At first we didn’t talk at all; he was catatonic,” she said. “In a sense, I was catatonic. I was shocked, I didn’t have a sense of what was going on.”

But after some time, the two began to warm up to one another.

“We just sat together for a while, and then one day he kind of looked and said ‘What’s your name?’” she said.

And they began to connect.

“He no longer sat catatonically; we talked for hours sometimes,” she said. “At the very end, he said to me, as it turns out we both left the same day, no one could get him out of that catatonic state, he said, ‘If it weren’t for your acts of kindness, I would not be able to walk out this door. Thank you.’ We healed each other through that connection.”

This is when Castore began spreading acts of kindness.

She also said she had a moment of darkness. During a time when she felt spread too thin and overwhelmed, Castore said she “just swerved to drive off the road, I just couldn’t take it.”

She attempted to take her own life.

But a car stopped her. “This car, had that car not stopped, I would not be here,” she said.

While she was recovering, her husband asked her if she was “OK.” Which she said she wasn’t, but over time it became her mission to help others be OK.

“As I progressed, I got better and better; I found the right medication,” she said. “I was really good, I had no episodes in years. Then I had this idea, why not have a campaign? I’m very much an advocate for mental health.”

With her experiences in her back pockets, the A-OK Lady adopted a superhero mission. “For the campaign, I woke up one day and decided,” she said.

Her campaign led her to start here, in Toledo.

“I came to Toledo because I like to play with words. To lead Ohio. That’s the connection,” she said. “And Toledo is north. And when we are lost, we look to the North Star. And we are a lost society, we aren’t totally lost. But we are disconnected.”

These are the types of connections and word play she has a unique knack for. It seemed as if she could spin any word into a positive vessel of kindness.

She said she visited Walgreens, which she sees as a combination of walls and the color green. “I like the word wall, because we hit walls in relationships and the color green represents growth,” she said.

She even transforms swear words into positivity. “I love shit, I really do,” she said. The word “shit” to her is a way of saying “shush” and “it.” In her way the word has a calming effect.

The A-OK Lady was full of these surprising gems of joy, but watching her in action is when I saw her effect.

I sat in Trimble Lounge as she captivated a group of six. Within the 25 minutes she sat with them, they all smiled at least once. By the end of their conversation she pulled large smiley face pillows out of her sack and a camera out of her red utility belt. She had them pose in all sorts of silly manners for pictures for her website.

When she left groups like this, she always asked them if they wanted hug. The usual answer was yes.

“I call myself an empowerer,” she said. “I’m empowering them to look at things in a different way in relationship to how they connect with people and motivate them. Just listening.”

And listen she did. Each person she encountered, including me, she asked for a story. She is a story collector — they are for a book she is composing.

She would pull out a small recorder, another surprise from her belt of wonder. The device had over 75 different recordings on it.

She would say, “Pick a number between 1 and 75.” Every recording she played for the students was a different story, but each story she remembered with perfect clarity.

And she would ask if there were any stories they wanted share. Through her time listening, she has met all sorts of people.

“There’s all kinds of different people,” she said. “Like ice cream, there are different flavors. I like to think there are different flavors of people.”

The A-OK Lady has her very own flavor too, a flavor that is unique to her, but extremely contagious.

After taking her around campus for three hours, I was getting physically and mentally drained, but her energy levels never dropped. She was ready to speak to any and every passerby.

In almost every other interview situation, I would be exhausted after three hours, but her compassion and kindness wore off on me.

She handed me a package of small yellow smiley faces and told me to share them. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t follow through, but for her beautiful smiling face and her compassionate mission, I promised I would.

 

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