The Vitamin Queen of Ojai

When a newspaper reporter splashes before-and-after photos in her Sunday edition of a wrinkling, graying, overweight 52 year-old math and computer science teacher who now looks like a thin, spooky-beautiful teenager, national TV and press crews scurry to Ojai, California, three hours northwest of Los Angeles, to christen a new international celebrity. The reporter concludes that Kelly Smith Ford’s miraculous transformation from grandma to teenager has something to do with vitamins, since Kelly, a vegetarian living a holistic lifestyle, is a vitamin expert who swallows 50 vitamins, supplements, minerals and herbs a day. 


Kelly Smith Ford calls herself a normal, ordinary woman, a wife, mother, and grandmother at the time she is discovered and unexpectedly thrust into a fourth lifestyle, that of a famous teenager, which she struggles to comprehend, as does her 56 year-old husband. Debates rage among scientific, religious, and other experts on aging and age reversal; some claim she is a fraud because she really can’t prove her age. The public clamors for a miracle vitamin from the Beverly Hills vitamin company that hires Kelly as a spokesperson while skeptics ask if this is a PR stunt. The question becomes: has Kelly really reversed the aging process, and if she has, how did she do it, because every woman, and man in the world wants to know how. There are some bizarre contradictions and complexities waiting not only for the public but for Kelly.