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The Fairy Godmother Shavette Neal Is the Big Kid Behind Thousands of Little Make-A-Wish Smiles
She doesn’t wear a cape. Nor does she employ the use of a twitching nose, pixie dust or a genie. If she owns a wand, it’s more of a prop that she made for someone else than a true magic stick. As a matter of fact, Shavette Neal is your average everyday person who can simply make seemingly impossible things happen on a regular basis. Take, for example, 11-year-old Frankie. One day he was just a boy nursing a broken heart with a country song he had scribbled on a crumpled piece of paper. Another day, he was an instant country music star in the studio recording his latest CD and in the midst of a four-day media blitz with his very own entourage including an entertainment lawyer and a publicist. As if press junkets in the morning, a proclamation from the mayor declaring it Frankie Day in his county, a live performance in front of his peers, and daily bags of his very own fan mail weren’t enough, Frankie and his family were invited to the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in Macon where he was presented a gold record and the same pin that Alan Jackson received as an honorary inductee into the Music Hall of Fame. Apparently superhuman powers are unnecessary when you have enough creativity and enthusiasm to become the personal fairy godmother to approximately 4,000 children. And counting.
I Wish I May, I Wish I Might Neal’s business card doesn’t read “The Fairy Godmother,” opting instead for the more official title as Director of Program Services for the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Georgia and Alabama. Yet, her office belies such formality. In tandem with Neal’s warm handshake and contagious smile, visitors of all ages are greeted by a 4-foot Mickey Mouse that sits towering among an army of smaller ones directly behind her chair. An original 1959 Mickey Mouse poster is mounted on the wall above the desk, along with sketches that Neal bought to celebrate her 30th birthday. “Most of these were gifts, but the rest is mine,” said the consummate kid at heart. “If you saw my office at home, you would just …” — she cuts herself off and laughs at her fascination with the world’s most beloved mouse. “My mom took me to Disney World for my 21st birthday,” Neal said, admitting shortly thereafter that she even has Mickey Mouse tattooed across her back. “And that was way before I had this job.” More of a passion than a job, Neal oversees 700 volunteers and six Wish Coordinators. As a team, they are currently juggling approximately 375 wishes for children between the ages of 21/2 and 18 diagnosed with life-threatening medical conditions. “No one is on a waiting list and I never have to turn away a child,” Neal said, adding, “but the timing [for each wish] varies.” Many of the eligible children are fighting sickle-cell anemia, certain types of muscular dystrophy, cancer, cystic fibrosis, and in some cases blood disorders like AIDS, meaning that a child’s health and treatment schedules have to be taken into account, oftentimes affecting how long it takes to grant a wish. And then there’s the wish itself, which can be as basic as a computer or as challenging as digging for dinosaur bones, hosting their own TV show, meeting certain celebrities, or even sending a wheelchair-bound boy skiing. “I like knowing that with every wish there is a hint of magic. Every day I have the pleasure of giving a child the opportunity to not have to think about their illness and just be a kid.” Recalling 6-year-old Danielle’s wish, Neal smiled and said, “[She] wanted to be a princess, she wanted macaroni and cheese and catfish at the ball and she wanted to dance with her brother. We rented a castle and created a fairy-tale place, The Land of Elleinada, where the King and Queen were retiring.” While the ceremony was taking place downstairs, Neal was upstairs with the soon-to-be-princess, who was rightfully nervous about perfecting her curtsey. “She asked me if I thought she could do it and I assured her she could,” Neal said. “The trumpets sounded and she walked down the stairs as if she were Grace Kelly, accepted her duties as princess and received her crown. I sat at the top of the stairs and watched in amazement. I like knowing that with every wish there is a hint of magic. Every day I have the pleasure of giving a child the opportunity to not have to think about their illness and just be a kid.” Any magic associated with a wish starts when the volunteers ask each child four basic questions: 1) if you could go anywhere, 2) if you could have anything, 3) if you could do anything, or 4) if you could meet anyone — where, what or who would it be — and it ends with an element of surprise that Neal attributes to attention to detail and the ability to be a kid.
From One Big Kid to Another She dressed as a flight attendant when Matthew became AirTran’s 8-year-old pilot for the day and acted as stage manager prepping Brianna’s models for the runway during a fashion show, but the biggest role typically happens behind the scenes for Neal, who claimed, “At 38, it’s cool to be 12.” Armed with what is usually a bare-bones request, she tries to get inside the minds of each child to figure out what it is they really want and filling in these blanks with creativity and imagination is what she does best. After being flown to Washington, D.C., 10-year-old Daniel, whose wish was to be president of the United States, was walking through the park with his family when they were suddenly stopped by the Secret Service. “The Secret Service rolled up on their bikes and asked if he was Daniel. When he said ‘Yes,’ they said, ‘Sir, we’re going to be guarding you now.’ Then all of a sudden his mother is his press secretary, his sister is Secretary of State and everybody got into character,” Neal said. And the surprises just kept coming. The next morning, Daniel’s hotel room was packed with people helping him practice his speech and put on a Brooks Brothers suit for the press conference he was to give on toy safety and snow days. Neal even went so far as to make sure when Daniel walked into a building, President Bush’s picture had been replaced with his own. “It’s all the attention to detail [that] sets [Make-A-Wish] apart and keeps us going. We play along and we tell everyone else to play along too because we only get one shot at this. Forget about being adults for a day — I have to think like Frankie. I have to think like Danielle,” Neal said. Thinking like a kid comes naturally for Neal who credits her grandmother for her youthful exuberance and uncanny knack for creativity. Born with a degenerative heart condition, her grandmother grew up an only child. Not only did she live to be 70 years old, she also made up for her lack of childhood friends by having 10 of her own children and spreading her enthusiasm for life throughout the family. “My grandmother is the biggest kid I ever knew. She taught us we could be anything, so we always tried everything. You didn’t have to be good at it, [but] you at least had to try it. We played golf, we skied, we had a beauty pageant in our back yard, we had a parade; we did so many things,” Neal recalled fondly. “We learned life was just about living. That’s a lot of what I bring to the job. She is the inspiration for who I am today.” With very little debate, it can be argued that Neal is to others what her grandmother was to her: She’s a kid in an adult body, she’s the creative force behind countless child-sized smiles, and she’s an inspiration to those she’s met along the way. Mouseketeer Magic Born in Detroit, Neal left her hometown for Orange County, Calif., where she worked for QuickStart Intelligence as production manager on a newly launched magazine. When an advertiser arrived late to a business dinner one night after meeting his first Wish Child at the airport, Neal asked, “ ‘What do you mean your first Wish Child?’ ” Within weeks, she and one of her co-workers started volunteering for the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Orange County. Call it divine intervention, fate, happenstance or just plain luck, but not even a year later, Neal accepted a job in Atlanta that was located directly underneath the Make-A-Wish office. When the catalog folded, Neal decided to do “something fun for a year” and literally ran upstairs to volunteer full-time with the foundation. Though she enjoys refinishing furniture and volunteering in her spare time, the self-proclaimed workaholic happily stays consumed with granting wishes, despite the fact that a tough day at work for Neal is significantly different than most. “I’ve gotten a call at 8 a.m. saying that a child will be taken off of life support at 9 p.m. I take care of those myself. I don’t personally have children of my own, so these are my kids. And when you get a call, you go.” Neal showed up at the hospital with a number of the child’s favorite toys and spent hours in the room having playtime with her. Though most people might question the point behind all of her effort, Neal simply replied, “The most important thing is that she knew I was there and that it was all about her. She got her wish, and for as sad of a day as it could have been, it wasn’t.” Dealing with loss is something Neal has learned to do over the years. When asked if she had a favorite of all the wishes she has granted, Neal shook her head, but reached for the magnetic frame attached eye-level on her file cabinet. “I don’t have a favorite wish, but my inspiration is my buddy, Ashley. I have to have her with me every day.” Neal is quiet for a few seconds, staring at the picture and searching for the right words. “Ashley was just an amazing kid. Each child teaches you something different … she taught me a lot — the greatest lessons in strength, honesty and joy.” Diagnosed in June of 1998 with Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia (ALL), Ashley’s wish was to go to Disney World. It happened to be the first wish Neal ever granted. “When we first found out that Ashley would be granted a wish, she was very sick at the time and we had to keep postponing meeting Shavette. But that didn’t stop her,” said Mishell Butler, Ashley’s mom who proudly recalled how Neal not only came to the hospital to meet Ashley for the first time, but came back to visit her often. “When she came to visit, she always brought Ashley some token: a purse, a teddy bear, something to make her smile and it always lifted her spirit. Ashley thought it was fascinating to have her own wish fairy.” Fortunately for Ashley, her wish fairy was bound and determined to get her to Disney World, even though she was in the hospital often and every time a date was set, the family had to postpone the trip. “It was Shavette’s idea to go to Disney World in February for [Ashley’s] birthday,” Butler said. “I can still see Ashley’s face when they came to the house in the limo and picked us up.” When Ashley and her family boarded the plane, Neal was there with a Mickey Mouse purse, Mickey Mouse ears and even a Mickey Mouse camera. Ashley was in Disney World the day she turned 9 years old. Ashley passed away in September of 2001, but the trip to Disney World remains a favorite memory for the family right alongside the Atlanta-based Mouseketeer that made it all happen. “Ashley never met a stranger and Shavette is the same way,” Butler said. “Her beautiful smile captured Ashley’s heart. Shavette has always been this loving, kind person who is an inspiration to more than just the kids.” She should know. Six years after losing her daughter, Butler started volunteering with the Make-A-Wish Foundation and recently granted her own first wish. “It was like reliving Ashley’s wish all over again. I never in my wildest dreams expected that it would feel so good to do that.” Perhaps given the opportunity, Neal would have wished to be a Mouseketeer responsible for always putting smiles on the faces of little children. Then again, maybe she did. PN Wish You Could Help? For more information on how to get involved with the foundation, please visit www.ga-al.wish.org.
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