THE SAULT STAR

The joy of abstinence

Witty one-liners and clever comebacks help Crudele bring a message to students

By Andy Tomec/The Sault Star

John Crudele wraps students around his finger.

A few memorable comeback lines from the John Crudele school of sexual abstinence:

“Do you wanna sit in the back seat?” “No, I’d rather sit up here with you.”

“C’mon, everybody’s doing it.” “Great, then you should have no trouble finding somebody else.”

“It’d only take a minute.” “What? Do I look like a microwave?”

“Baby, you’re one in a million.” “Yeah, well so are your chances.”

With the flawless timing of a stand-up comic and an endless arsenal of sharp one-liners at hand, Crudele is just about the hippest thing this bleary-eyed crowd of Bawating Collegiate students could have expected at 9 a.m. on a school day.

After a few minutes he’s got these teens wrapped around his proverbial finger. Which is pretty surprising, considering that the message this motivational speaker is preaching runs counter to every “if it feels good do it” rock video and beer commercial this crowd has ever been bombarded with.

Strip away the charm, the suave good looks and the witty rapport, and Crudele’s message really isn’t much different from the advice many of these kids have received— and, in all likelihood, ignored—from dear old Mom: don’t mess with drugs, smoking will kill you, sex can wait.

Tying it all together is a theme of no-compromise abstinence.

Too many teens, he says, have convinced themselves they can afford to make all the mistakes they want now and save the luxury of having regrets for later.

“High school is not a dress rehearsal for life. It IS life,” he tells them.

“You become what you practice, you live what you learn and you can’t unexperience what you learn.”

The stand-up routine has fallen by the wayside now, as Crudele moves in for the kill.

“Magic Johnson didn’t believe that having sex with 200 or so people would hurt him. And now Magic Johnson is going to die of AIDS,” he says.

“Magic can be forgiven for his choices, but he’s still going to have to live with the consequences of them.”

Crudele is spending three days in the Sault as part of the Algoma’s Children’s Aid Society’s Children’s Week celebration.

In his many years on the North American speaking circuit, the Minnesota native estimates he’s delivered his popular motivational schtick to more than a million high school and elementary students, teachers and parents.

From a troubled home himself (as teens, his sister was bulimic, and his brother became a drug addict), he has a keen understanding of the temptations and fears facing teens in today’s world.

If more are succumbing to the drug abuse, alcoholism, teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases today than did during his generation, he believes it’s because many of them are being brought up without the same level of support from institutions like family, community and church.

As outmoded as some of those concepts have come to appear, Crudele argues they gave kids a moral compass—a toolbox of beliefs to help them work through the everyday dilemmas and temptations teenagers face.

“More and more we expect kids to teach themselves. That’s not the way it was when we were growing up,” he says in an interview.

There’s an emptiness in kids’ lives today—a void,” he adds.

“I tell them that all vacuums suck. It’s got to get filled with something. And if it’s not filled with goodness, it’s going to be filled with something else.”

Although the main thrust of Crudele’s take-responsibility-for-your-life message is aimed at teens, he maintains it’s the adults who must bear the final responsibility for the way our teens turn out.

You won’t find the reason for teens’ bad behavior in their genes, he says, but in what they’ve been taught by example.

“It’s up to us as adults to begin living those things that we ask you to live,” he tells the group.

“It’s called accountability.”