Principal Survivor

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Debbie Beebe sounds like a mini hailstorm as she strides the halls of J.F.Drake Middle School in strappy heels.

TapTapTapTapTapTap. She’s moving fast now.

“Michael!” she calls out. The student looks up. He looks both a little guilty and a little pleased to be singled out.

“You’re eating cheese with your hands going down the hall! You’re going to spill it all over the floor. Your mother would be disgusted,” she scolds teasingly.

“No she wouldn’t,” a student calls out as he walks by.

“Who said that?” Beebe whirls to see who has the smart mouth. Laughter follows.

She’s wearing a black-and-white giraffe-print jacket and big rings on her fingers, one with little chains streaming from it. She sticks her head into a classroom where children eat lunch. Before she says a word, a boy shouts:

“My girlfriend broke up with me!”

He sounds excited to confess, to win Mrs. Beebe’s attention.

“Your girlfriend broke up with you? Do you need to go home sick?”

“Yes” he assures her.

“What’s odd is you feel the need to announce this,” she counters.

They chat a bit about his emotional state.

“Do you want me to talk to her and tell her how sad you are?”

He thinks he might. Instead, she offers advice.

“The best thing you can do with this girl stuff is to man up, act like you don’t care, and you’re moving on. Then she might like you again.”
“No she won’t,” someone offers.

“Well guess what? There’s 200 and some girls in this school in seventh grade.”

TapTapTapTap. There are 930 kids in this school. The principal may not know every student by name, but she knows a lot of them. She’s crazy about them. It’s evident in everything she does. “Middle school kids get a bad rap,” Beebe says. “I absolutely love this age because you can have fun with them and be silly with them. I just think they’re a blast socially.”

“Every day is a new adventure in middle school,” she says, and as if on cue, a band playing in the hallway strikes up the opening notes to “Eye of the Tiger,” background accompaniment for an adventure.

This busy school is Beebe’s stage, the place where she is star, diva, goddess, ruler of all she sees. Even teachers seem to respond to this quality in her. She pokes her head into another classroom, where students who will attend the middle school next year are gathered.

“Hey guys! Is everybody having a good visit? Hey, I haven’t seen you in forever! How are you?” A semi-circle of teachers surrounds her, teachers who every week have followed her fate on television. “Don’t I look beautiful?” Beebe says of her television appearances. “Am I not the cleanest, most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen on TV?”

Beebe was a contestant on the eighteenth season of the reality show, “Survivor,” traveling to the desert highlands of Brazil hoping to win $1 million dollars and avoid snakes — both reptilian and human — survive insects, endure hunger, suffer bone-chattering cold and enervating heat, and participate in a series of challenges that brought either a reward or protection against being voted out of the game by teammates. It’s a grueling contest that demands strength and endurance, both mental and physical, as well as emotional resilience, athleticism, social flexibility, and wit. Debbie lasted thirty-three of thirty-nine days before she was voted out, which meant she was one of the last six contestants remaining, and helped decide who would win the million dollars.

In the end, her vote for the million, and every vote of her fellow competitors, went to fellow Alabaman James “JT” Thomas Jr. of Sampson, who combined physical competitive agility, huggable charm, savvy judgment, and the help of a smart friend, to take home the million dollars.

Although Debbie hoped to create a scholarship fund for middle school kids had she won the million “after a little splurge for myself and my family” — including children Alisssa Cima, nineteen, and Tanner Cima, sixteen, as well as step-children Taylor Beebe, a sophomore at Troy University, Sydney Beebe, a senior at Auburn High School, and Max Beebe, a freshman at Auburn Junior High — the money was never her whole focus. The real contest was with herself, she says, and the prizes she sought ineffable: the adventure of a lifetime, the ultimate test of her mettle, and friends she intends to hang onto forever.
And, for a woman for whom appearance matters, there was another part of the challenge: watching herself on TV.

“It’s very surreal,” she said. “People dream of being on TV, but you don’t dream of being on TV looking your absolute worst.”
TV Debbie was dirty with scraggly hair and dark roots. There was no soap, shampoo, toothbrushes, toothpaste, toilet paper, deodorant, or hairbrushes for contestants. They buried their waste “like a cat,” Debbie says, used tree leaves to wipe themselves, and hoped not too many horrible insects were attracted to this necessary duty. The only concession to civilization was women were provided tampons when they needed them.

Auburn Debbie is a clothes horse. She turned a room of her house into a closet. She wears dramatic necklaces by Franco Pianegonda. Her office closet contains the dress she had hoped to wear to the season finale – she wasn’t allowed to because its gold and silver fabric was too sparkly — and wildly patterned Emilio Pucci pants, which she later describes as “Austin Powers” pants. Her hair is flat- ironed to perfection and — as she likes to describe it — naturally blond.

When her husband Bret Beebe and son Tanner picked her up at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport after her seven weeks in Brazil, her first request was a shopping trip to Nordstroms. “I want to feel fabulous,” she told her startled personal shopper. “I felt like one of those apple-head shrunk-up dolls.” She couldn’t tell him why she was skinny as a post, bedraggled, and stick-a-fork-in-her over-tanned. She signed a strict confidentiality agreement that carried a stinging penalty. “I did buy some great clothes,” she says. “I was 80 pounds. How stupid was that?”

TV Debbie flew beneath the radar — in “Survivor” fan parlance — not attracting much attention to herself, even declining to dish during on-camera interviews for most of the show.

“My strategy was to go in and try to keep my mouth shut and not be the leader,” Debbie says. Regular “Survivor” viewers know that the bossy person — particularly the bossy woman — has a short life on the show. Leaders generally emerge by unspoken consensus, and unless it’s a tribe of women, those leaders, so far, are men.

“I lead here every day. I decided to go there and lay back, and be friendly, helpful, outgoing, do anything I could do, do the best I could in all the challenges.”
Real-life Debbie is not a below-the-radar personality. She is the noisiest person in the halls of her school. She’s been known to roller skate from class to class. She is decisive, responding quickly to problems. She’s full of a million ideas on how to help children learn and help teachers teach. She teases everyone, teachers as much as students, and they all tease her back. Her efforts as an educator have earned broad recognition. Two years ago she was named Alabama Middle School Principal of the Year.

But Survivor Debbie had to deal with the fact that almost everything was beyond her control. She couldn’t control how she was portrayed. She couldn’t control other contestants. She couldn’t even control how much food she ate or whether she could keep warm or cool. All she controlled was what she thought, what she spoke, and how she acted. It was the hardest part of the game.

“None of it was easy, but the part that was most shocking was the intense mental game. The part that I did not prepare myself for enough was the mental game. That was truly difficult.” It required her to keep thoughts of her family — whom she missed desperately — behind locked doors. It meant pouring on the effort in physical challenges when she hadn’t eaten and hadn’t slept. It meant controlling emotions in an atmosphere designed to provoke scheming and lies.

“We were crazy as bats by day thirty. We had bug bites — we looked like we had chicken pox. There are flies that bite and leave larva in your skin, and if you scratch, worms would come out. There we were living in absolute torture, knowing people were talking about you behind your back.”

Nights were impossible, uncomfortable, scary and cold. They huddled together on a bed of palm fronds — far from an ideal mattress. Each frond had a hard spine down its center. If she even tried to turn over in the night, she had to wake up completely. Snakes were drawn to their body warmth. Rather than focus on her miseries, or slip into thoughts of her family and her home, she went shopping.

“I would take my brain to the mall and I would shop. Or I would take my brain to St. Martin. The island of St. Martin is one of my favorite places in the world. … If I laid there and thought about my family, I would cry all night.”

Then there were the nights when she had to get out of bed. If during the day they had won a meal, getting up in the middle of the night was hard to avoid.

“When your body goes through starvation mode, and you eat mounds of food quick, one end or the other end, it was coming out. That wasn’t so fun in middle of night to be up scurrying around. It’s pitch black if there are clouds.” There were snakes to worry about. “You made as much noise and scuffled as much as you could.

“I’m like the ultimate girly girl. I get my nails and toes done. It was insane,” she says.

Temperature extremes added to the misery. When she was being vetted to be on the show, she told one interviewer, “I live in Alabama. I know what hot is.” But, really, she says, she had no idea. Temperatures often reached 125. Cold may have been worse. When temperatures dipped below 40, the contestants were often stuck in wet clothes.

“I’ve never been colder in my life than the day I won the reward challenge,” she says.

Her parents, John and Connie Staton, who live off Wrights Mill Road in Auburn, knew their daughter could take care of herself, but of course they worried. “She’s always been out front. She’s always been a leader. She’s always been a caring individual,” John said. “I worried about circumstances that she couldn’t control.

“She was gone seven weeks. We hadn’t gone seven days in her life without talking to her, let alone seven weeks. It was a trying time.”
But his daughter, who got up on water skis the first time at age four, has always been full of surprises. When he was in Kansas recently, where Debbie grew up, he found out her sixth-grade teacher still remembered one of Debbie’s stunts. Debbie prepared a paper on her parents’ hobbies: Her father water skied and went scuba diving and did all kinds of fabulous things, she wrote. Her mother, she wrote, liked to pick the fleas off the dog. Then she put a big red “A” on her paper and hung it on the refrigerator.

“Connie [Debbie’s mom] took that paper to a parent-teacher conference and walked up to that teacher and said, ‘I want you to know my favorite hobby is not pulling fleas off our dog.’” The teacher had no idea what she was talking about.

“I think my parents wonder where I came from,” Debbie says.

As tough as “Survivor” turned out to be, Debbie and the other contestants were able to avoid some dangers that the support crew couldn’t. During taping, she said, a number of the “Survivor” crew members were bitten by snakes and had to be flown out for treatment.

“The vipers were pretty aggressive. … I have completely new respect for the people behind the scenes of anything.” When the contestants were walking down paths, camera and sound crew members ran through the brush or swamps to capture their movements, taking risks the contestants could avoid.

She guesses there are some 400 people on location with “Survivor.” They never helped cast members —“no one threw us a sandwich” — nor did they shoo away snakes or spiders. Even though contestants were always surrounded by camera crews, it was still easy to forget that the camera captured everything.
“Your weakest moments become America’s entertainment,” Debbie says. Her moment came on day thirty, when she lost her temper while talking to Sierra Reed, a twenty-three-year-old model from Los Angeles. Debbie wasn’t the only person who had had it with Sierra. While Debbie was often shown with an arm around the younger woman, comforting her, Debbie says the editing doesn’t show what a whiny know-it-all Sierra was. It made Debbie’s tribe look puzzlingly cruel. “They can make you look however they want with editing,” Debbie says. Tyson Apostal, a professional cyclist from Lindon, Utah, one of Debbie’s principal allies, calls Sierra “stupid” on more than one occasion, both behind her back and to her face. Benjamin “Coach” Wade is painfully condescending to her. But viewers never have a clear idea what’s behind the animosity. Even the show’s host, Jeff Probst, said during the show’s finale that he didn’t understand why Sierra was so roundly disliked.

“Sierra got some good editing,” Debbie said. “She didn’t take abuse, she dished abuse. She was always right. She knows everything at 23. … What was edited was two days of Sierra’s bantering, of whining, of crying. … I had had enough.” And she lost her cool.

She regrets it. At that moment, “I’m not my nurturing self for her.”

It wasn’t what she wanted the kids in her school to see, and it’s not the real Debbie, says her friend, Auburn resident Beth Ann Mitchell. “She’s fun-loving, laughing, always smiling, wanting to take care of everybody, wanting everybody to be happy. That’s the Debbie I know.” Mitchell went to the finale show in New York City with Debbie and her family, and she said other “Survivor” contestants said the same thing about her. “She was the caretaker,” they told her. “She’s a giving person.”

Probably more puzzling than the Sierra episode for a lot of viewers was Debbie’s alliance with Benjamin Wade of Bolivar, Missouri, who called himself Coach. (Coach was fired from coaching women’s soccer at Southwest Baptist University in Missouri as the “Survivor” season began. Some reports say Wade left just before his team’s final matches and failed to tell college officials how long he would be gone.) No other “Survivor” contestant this season drew the attention Coach has drawn — almost all of it unfavorable. His name is often paired with the words “pompous ass” in online discussions.

“Either Coach has lived one of the most colorful lives in the history of humanity or the man is full of ...,” one blogger writes.

“Coach seems to suffer from whatever it is that [former Illinois governor Rod ] Blagojevich has,” another blogger says.

Coach’s constant references to himself as “dragon slayer,” his daily martial arts-like rituals that crackled with self-seriousness, and his fabulously self-aggrandizing tales were just some of the things that had other contestants rolling their eyes wildly whenever he spoke. His most notable story sounds like something we’ve seen on Bugs Bunny. Intrepid adventurer Coach is paddling the Amazon — after telling National Geographic that they were not welcome to film his journey — when small native people take him prisoner. Before he ends up in the stew pot with Bugs, he escapes, with indigenous peoples in hot pursuit. (Maybe they heard one too many of his stories.) On the show’s final episode Coach presents lie detector results that, he says, support the truth of this episode in his life.

While Debbie acknowledges some of the weirder aspects of Coach’s performance — she didn’t know he called himself “dragon slayer” until she watched the show — she has a lot of affection for him.

“He has a good heart,” she says. “He’s really semi-normal,”

The alliance between Debbie and Coach may have its roots in the grueling march to their campsite. The group lost its way, and what should have been a two hour hike hauling gear and food became a five and a half hour ordeal.

“At one point I couldn’t feel my legs. I thought, ‘I’m going to have heat stroke.’ I didn’t want to show any sign of weakness. Coach had on a long-sleeve black shirt. He says, ‘I’m sick. I’m sick. Give me some water.’ He didn’t want anybody to know.” He helped her, too, giving her the soccer socks he wore to protect her bare calves from the stinging weeds. By the third day, she was in an alliance with him and Tyson, whose own comments about other tribe members were often unkind.

“That was part of his sarcastic humor,” Debbie said. “Tyson absolutely was my rock out there. He made me laugh. … He kept things funny, exciting. I knew I could trust him.”

Debbie had no idea where she was going when she left for “Survivor.” She couldn’t even tell Auburn Superintendent Terry Jenkins that she was going to be on the show when she asked for an unpaid leave. But she still tried to get ready. Every morning from June until she left in October, she reported to Gold’s Gym Max at 189 East University Drive, where Sarah Longshore trained her. Debbie couldn’t tell the trainer what she wanted to prepare for, but friends knew Debbie had been interviewed for “Survivor” in one of its early seasons, and rumor had it she may be heading to “Survivor” now. That worried Sarah.

“You could tell she had been an athlete when she was younger, but she had not worked out in several years. I was a little nervous,” Sarah said. Debbie’s drive made up for everything. She’d arrive before five each morning, and at Sarah’s urging, lift, and run, and leap around with a weighted vest.

“Debbie’s so much fun, she makes everything fun,” Sarah said. “We did pullups and push-ups and leaps with a weighted vest on. She would run two days a week with the vest, and two days a week she did the stair climber.” On off days, they’d do yoga and stretching. The last week before Debbie left, Sarah had her do nothing but yoga and stretching — over Debbie’s protests. But Sarah wanted her to be rested for the burst of energy she’d need.

Still, the walk into camp almost convinced Debbie she wasn’t really prepared. She and contestant Erinn Lobdell, a hairdresser from Waukesha, Wisconsin, carried the team flag between them, with supplies dangling from the flagpole. Debbie’s shoulder is still scarred from where the pole rubbed. It took a long time for the bleeding to stop. She lost three toenails during the hike. Her boots were too small. She’d never worn them before.

“I thought I was in such great shape. I’m thinking, what have I signed up for? Have I lost my mind? My legs are numb. The hike was absolutely horrible.”
But Debbie’s downfall turned out not to be physical but strategic. The other players convinced her to turn on her ally, Coach. Tyson had been voted out in a previous episode, and Debbie was scrambling to save herself. Viewers of the show saw Debbie seeming to mastermind Coach’s downfall, but Debbie says that’s all editing. What viewers see is her responding to the efforts of other contestants.

When Debbie is voted out in that week’s tribal council, Coach looks like he may cry.

“Obviously he was hurt by me,” Debbie says. “He didn’t realize really what was going on.” During an edited part of the final tribal council, Debbie says she asked finalists Stephen Fishbach, a corporate consultant from New York City, and JT, why they made her vote against her ally if they were just going to vote her off anyway. Why not manipulate her to vote for someone she had no allegiance to? “They said, ‘You’re right. We feel bad about that.’”
But in the long run, none of that really matters, she says. She remains close friends with Coach, and Tyson and all of the other “Survivor” players. All the drama, the backstabbing, the lying, and the conniving — the essentials of the game — come to nothing when you get home. Not after what they went through together. “We have this incredible bond,” Debbie says. “We all really care about each other. I’m going to be friends with them forever.”