Lynne Murray says:

Thanks to Tante Terri at Fatties United for sharing another fat hero:

Lynne Hurdle-Price is amazing.

She is a wife, mother, actress, writer, runs her own company (creating honest dialogue on diversity), she has a workshop series helping teens to face fear and achieve their best, she has her own entertainment production company and was a finalist for Nick at Nite’s Funniest Mom in America Contest.

Whew.

I also went “Whew!” after contemplating all that energy. Then I watched the six minute clip of Hurdle-Price’s presentation at TEDxWomen. TED Conferences (Technology Entertainment and Design) are a global series of conferences devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. They have been around for 26 years, but I only heard of them through Nate Heller’s article in The New Yorker. Heller says, “People who know TED these days frequently know it best from “TED Talks,” a series of Internet lecture videos that has received more than eight hundred million views to date.”

TEDxWomen explains the concept in a nutshell: “At TED, the world’s leading thinkers and doers are asked to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Talks are then made available, free, at TED.com.”

Going beyond the high-end TED experience (where tickets begin at $7,500 and attendance is by invitation or application) TEDx events expand the format to a more grassroots model.

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TED has created a program called TEDx. TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. Our event is called TEDxWomen, where x = independently organized TED event. At our TEDxWomen event, TEDTalks video and live speakers will combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events, including ours, are self-organized.

Hurdle-Price’s TEDx  presentation is six minutes long. In it, she describes the dawn of her self-hatred when her beloved dance class turned into a traumatic moment of public humiliation, and she shares her journey to reclaim her own self worth and foster it in others:

“We must lay down our arms and stop sowing hatred. We must reflect back each other’s intrinsic worth.”You won’t be sorry for watching the whole thing.

If you’re putting off watching until later, here’s how it begins:

I was raised in an all-white neighborhood in the sixties. And if I came home and said that somebody had called me the N-word, I could be certain that my mom would say, “Well, they’re wrong. You are not that. You are as good as anybody else.” And if I came home and said that somebody had said that I was not as good as a boy, well, I could be certain that my dad would say, “Don’t listen to that. You can do anything those boys can do–even better.” And if I came home and said that somebody had called me fat and said that I wasn’t as good as somebody thin, well, I could be certain that I would be told “They’re right, now lose weight.” And my community of loved ones would support that.

We need every hero and role model we can get and I’m glad to have found another–and possibly more to come through TEDxWomen!