♪ MICHELE CARLO: And at this point in my life, I was just so over anything having to do with having to explain who or what I was.

MIKELINA BELAINEH: But despite this connection I felt, I was living a double life.

I was a law student by day, and a powerlifter by night.

MATTHEW SABLAN: I can't have our love affair start out on a creepy note.

It would make for a bad song.

I have to fix this.

WES HAZARD: Our theme for this evening is, "Make It Or Break It."

ANNOUNCER: This program is made possible in part by contributions from viewers like you.

Thank you.

High stakes, risk/reward, abject failure, supreme triumph-- these are all potential elements in a make-it-or-break-it story, right?

And I think that we've all had some variation of that.

Maybe it was leaving the safe job to pursue that risky opportunity that you'd been thinking about for years.

Maybe it was opening up yourself to embarrassment by, you know, revealing to that special someone how you truly feel.

I think no matter what happens, we all learn a lot about ourselves.

You know, often those stories don't go as well as we had planned.

But no matter what happens, it's in those specific moments, those make-it-or-break-it moments where we really find out who we are and what we're made of.

♪ CARLO: I'm a native New Yorker.

I'm a natural redhead, and I'm a Nuyorican, which means I'm a person of Puerto Rican heritage that was born and raised in New York City.

I'm also a storyteller and a solo theatrical performer and actor.

I also have a book called "Fish Out of Agua: My Life on Neither Side of the (Subway) Tracks," and it's about growing up as a red-headed, freckle-faced, light-skinned Puerto Rican in an Italian-Irish neighborhood in the Bronx back in the boogie-down '70s.

HAZARD: Why is it important for you to talk about your Latina experience?

Like, how does that manifest in your stories?

CARLO: Because... Latinos and people of color in general, our stories have been dismissed, discounted, and discarded.

When I was growing up, there were no Latinas in the media for me to emulate.

And I noticed that every... for every other culture, an, a "foreign," if you will, accent was considered elegant and desirable.

But a Latino accent was considered base and unlovely.

And my mission, with all, any art that I do, whether I'm writing a solo show or telling a story or writing, is, I want the world to know who we were and why we mattered.

♪ It was 1982, and I had finally been accepted into the art school of my dreams, only to learn I might have to drop out before I even began.

My father lost his job and my family had to go on welfare, and I had no idea how I was going to be able to continue.

So as a last resort, I went to the school's guidance counselor, who asked me, "Well, didn't you apply for any financial aid?"

And I answered, "Yes, I had," but let me explain.

I am a red-headed, freckle-faced, pale-skinned Puerto Rican who grew up in an Italian-Irish neighborhood.

I am the red sheep of my Latino family.

I was the fish out of agua in my neighborhood.

I was never Latin enough for most people in my family, and I was never white enough for most people in my neighborhood.

And at this point in my life, I was just so over anything having to do with having to explain who or what I was.

Where the application said, "Put in your ethnicity," I wrote in "redhead."

And where it said, "Race," I put "human."

(laughter) And the counselor looked at me like, "What is wrong with you, girl?"

And then she painstakingly explained that specifically because I was a Latina, I was qualified for all kinds of financial aid.

What is wrong with you, girl?

So I resubmitted the applications, and I got all the aid I needed to stay in school, along with an internship-- a prestigious internship at a major advertising agency.

(light cheering) Thank you!

(applause) Whoo!

I didn't expect...

It was called the Minority Student Internship Program.

Kids from colleges all across New York had applied.

12 were accepted, and I was one of them.

(audience member cheers) Thanks.

Only I nearly blew it that first day and was thrown out because of something called LPT.

Does anyone here know what LPT is?

It's what we call Latin People Time.

It's a misunderstanding of the space-time continuum that causes the afflicted to leave their house at the time they're supposed to be wherever they are going.

And, yeah, that happened to me.

And, besides being late, I learned that I also had a misunderstanding of what was considered proper office attire.

My fellow internees were wearing Lacoste and Le Tigre polo shirts and little Benetton bow blouses, and I was wearing a violet tiger-print T-shirt and black Spandex pants and pointy-heeled shoes with long, feather earrings, yes.

(applause) I know!

What were you wearing in 1982?

Come on.

But then, they served breakfast, and there were croissants.

I had never seen a croissant before.

For the past few months, I had been living on hot dogs and that welfare cheese and that peanut butter in a can.

And when I tasted one, I ate and I ate and I ate and I ate and I ate until I took a breath, and I saw that all the brown and beige faces of the interns on this side, and all the older and paler faces of the leaders on that side were glaring at me.

And I thought, "This is it, Michele.

"You blew it.

"You are going to be thrown out of here "and you are going to have to... "And you didn't get this internship because of merit.

"You got it because of fraud, "and you're going to have to go right back "to that top-floor tenement walk-up and rot because that's what you deserve."

And then when I came to, everybody was leaving.

And the interns left without saying goodbye to me, and as I tried to sneak out, the leaders of the group called me back and warned me to not be late again in the future.

And, by the way, where was my family from again?

And the next week, I'm in my cubicle when I hear a commotion behind me.

And then I realized that every intern had been assigned to a different agency, and every week, we were going to visit a different intern to see what he or she was doing.

And this first week, guess what?

It was my turn.

So all the interns and all the leaders file into my cubicle, and they catch me not doing agency work, but designing T-shirts that I was going to sell at the summer rock concerts in Central Park.

And there's a moment of silence where everybody's, like, looking.

And then, the preppiest male intern of them all looked at the T-shirt that I'm designing and says, "Um, wow.

You know King Crimson?"

And I said, "Know them?

Well, we're making these T-shirts for them."

Which was kind of not really true.

I mean, my boyfriend and I, yes, we were together making these T-shirts to sell at the concert, but King Crimson didn't know who we were.

And then another silence, and then the questions start, a barrage of questions: "Well, where do you get the T-shirts?"

And "What kind of ink do you use?"

And "What is your sales model?"

And I answer, I said, "We get the T-shirts "at this wholesaler on Orchard Street, and I get the silk screening from Pearl Paint."

I didn't tell them that the sales model was basically my boyfriend and I sneaking into the concerts and waving the T-shirts around, "Buy one!

Buy one!

Buy one!"

But, amazingly, I became the model project for the group.

And every week after that, they would ask me how my T-shirt business was going.

And one week, one of the girls, who had given me the worst side-eye of all the day I ate all the croissants, she came up to me and she confessed that at that breakfast, she, too, wanted to eat all the croissants.

(laughter) Because she had never seen one before, and her family was on welfare, too.

I certainly learned a lot that summer at that internship.

I learned what was and what wasn't proper office attire.

I learned how not to make a glutton of myself at a catered luncheon.

And I also learned that I had a pretty darn good design eye.

And the agency offered me a job after graduation.

(applause) Only...

Thank you.

On our last meeting, which was going to be a big catered farewell lunch, I was stricken with LPT again, and I was 15 minutes late, and I was trembling as my hand was on that doorknob.

Were they going to throw me out?

Was I going to lose my job?

Was everybody going to, like, yell at me?

And then when I opened the door, I saw 11 smiling faces waving me in.

They were about to take a group picture, and they had told the photographer to hold it, to wait for me until I got there, because the summer would not have been the same without me.

(applause and cheering) And I do admit to occasionally suffering from a relapse of LPT, but I've learned to joke about it.

And I like to say that when my time comes, on my tombstone is going to be engraved, "There lies Michele Carlo.

She needed another 15 minutes."

Thank you, everybody!

(applause) ♪ SABLAN: I'm originally from southern California.

I came out here to Boston for graduate school, started the master's in theology, and then ended up switching out and doing a master's in social work.

That's what I'm doing right now, studying to be a clinical therapist.

HAZARD: How does storytelling fit in with that picture?

SABLAN: Oh, I think it has everything to do with it, really.

I mean, therapy, it's all about listening to the other person, helping them come more fully to life, making yourself small so that they can take up the room.

But on the other side of it, I think if you're actually telling a story, you're sharing the stuff of your own life in a way that you can bring out in other people the things that they've gone through that are similar.

You bring them into that story, because just the act of sharing it with them is something intimate, so I think the two kind of go together very well.

HAZARD: So, interesting fact, I think that a subject, one of the subjects of your story that you'll be telling tonight, will actually be in the television audience.

How do you feel about that?

SABLAN: Oh, I love it.

He has no idea that he's actually a part of the story or that I'm bending the arc of the story towards him.

And it's just turned out that way, that he's in town.

I can't wait for it.

I knew I was going to tell it before I thought he would be available, but once I found out he would, I was, like, "This is going to be great."

I've actually really enjoyed keeping him in the dark about it.

♪ I first noticed Christina Kineavy because she was reading "Harry Potter."

And by the time I was a junior in high school, I decided I wanted to ask her out.

My opportunity, so I thought, came when she had purchased a used car.

It was a car that had an antenna on it, back when cars had antennas, and on top of that antenna was an antenna ball that came in the form of a hot dog wearing a terrified expression, a top hat, and arms and legs that made it look like it was holding on for dear life.

And she hated it.

She hated it, and I saw in this hot dog my opportunity.

I thought this was a dragon that I could slay, appropriate to my skill level.

(laughter) And so I said, "I'll be in the area tomorrow.

"When you're at band practice, I can swing by and remove it for you."

And she said, "Oh, thanks.

That'd be lovely."

I ran home and I frantically called my friend Stanley, and I said, "Could you make it so that I could be in the area tomorrow?"

You see, I had known Stanley since I was in preschool, and he had access to both a license and a car; namely, his mother's van, a van that was so huge that we referred to it as the Space Shuttle.

So he shows up the next day, and as I step into the van, what I hear is the mix tape that he had put together that had a collection of rap and the soundtrack to "Muppet Treasure Island," because, in his words, "They were equally good songs."

And so with Tupac and Gonzo serenading us on our way, we leave to go pick up flowers.

I think I have to have flowers because that's what you do for a girl-- you bring her flowers.

Except, all of a sudden, nothing is open.

The flower store is closed.

It's under repairs or renovation.

It sells what looks like weeds.

And I'm panicking.

Well, I see something eventually as we're driving along the freeway that's common to Southern California-- a man on the side of the road selling flowers and avocados.

So we cut across five lanes of heavy traffic at the last second, so that we can get there on time to buy these flowers, except I have a debit card and he, of course, is only taking cash.

So Stanley has to spot me, which is not, I tell myself, a bad omen.

And then, we head right back to her school, pull into the parking lot.

We find the car-- it's easy, because this hot dog ornament is truly atrocious.

Remove it easy as pie, and I set to tie the flowers in its place and leave a note asking her out.

And it's at this moment that I hear my phone go off, and it's her calling.

And I answer, and I realize I'm hearing her in stereo.

She's five feet away on the other side of the bushes, and she's calling to say, "Thanks for coming by to remove that hood ornament," because she's got out of practice early and she just wanted to say thank you.

And now I'm panicking.

I have nowhere to go, I have nothing to do.

And so what do I do?

I hide behind this monstrosity of a van, and Stanley has nowhere to go.

And so he does the only thing that he can do, and he drops to the dirt, and he rolls underneath his mother's van.

(laughter) Well, now I'm talking to Christina, and I'm trying to at once whisper so that she can't realize that I'm right here, but not make it so quiet that she realizes on the phone that something's up.

And then it hits me, is there anything creepier than hiding behind a car watching the girl you like when she doesn't know you're there?

I think, I can't have our love affair start out on a creepy note.

It would make for a bad song.

I have to fix this.

(laughter) And so I step out from around the van, and I just say... (voice squeaking): "Hi."

And she looks at me and says, "Oh, hey!

"You're still here.

Why do you have flowers?"

And in this moment of great courage, I say, "Because you did so well on that school presentation "you did the other day, and I just thought you needed a reward."

And completely chicken out.

And she says, "Oh, well, thank you!"

And maybe it would have been okay at that moment, except it hits me again, maybe the only other thing creepier than watching this girl you like in a car not knowing is having some other guy laying under a car that she doesn't know about.

(laughter) So I have to fix that, too.

And before I can think it through, I say out loud to her, "I'd like to you meet my friend Stanley."

And he rolls out from under the van, covered in dirt and oil, pops up, extends his hand, shakes hands with her, calm as you please, and then steps back into his van.

Well, Christina and I lock eyes, and I'm just, like, (laughs nervously).

She says, "Thanks for the flowers," and she drives off, taking all my romantic aspirations with her.

Christina and I never did go out.

In fact, to this day, we're still friends, but she's actually engaged to an Air Force doctor who is applying to the NASA astronaut program, so she's doing fine.

(laughter) But the funny thing about this story is that I've always told it to people having a bad day.

I see them, and I think, man, if you need to have a bad day get better, you need to hear about my bad day, where I quite literally threw a friend under the bus.

(laughter) But over the years, the story has transformed, because as much as it was a bad day, I keep going back and looking at it and thinking, "Wow, Stanley is a really good friend," because when I got back into the van after she left, he turned to me and he said, "So, what'd she say?"

And all I could think was, "You daft fool.

"Do you really think I could have asked a girl out after you just rolled out from under a car?"

(laughter) But he still believed in me.

He drove me there.

He paid for my flowers.

He hid under a car.

He came out from under the car, and he still thought I could do it.

And, Stanley, that's why you're a great friend.

(applause and cheering) ♪ BELAINEH: My name is Mikelina Belaineh, but I go by Mickey.

I grew up in Arlington, Texas, but my family is actually from Ethiopia, in Eritrea, so I'm a first-generation American.

I went to Texas A&M for my undergrad, and then I moved up to Cambridge for law school at Harvard.

HAZARD: And now, here you are doing storytelling... BELAINEH (laughing): Yeah.

HAZARD: And as I understand, this is your first night doing live storytelling.

And do you have any tips for people?

BELAINEH: I took an approach that was similar to how I've ever prepared for any speeches or public speaking in the past.

At first, I just kind of wrote out what I thought my story was, and just kind of edited it down from there.

Then I just practiced-- I would do it in chunks, if you will.

So I would go through the first part, try and memorize it, and continue trying, just try over and over again until I had that locked down, and then move on to the second section, and then trying going from first section to second section.

Once I had that down, add the third one, and then go through it again.

HAZARD: Well, given all that you've achieved, I don't think you have anything to worry about.

I'm definitely looking forward to hearing your story myself.

BELAINEH: Thank you.

HAZARD: If you had a message to convey, what would that be?

BELAINEH: It would be that, I guess, don't let conventional wisdom or methods or anything like that box you in to how you live your life.

You know, there's a lot of... there's a lot of inputs that we get throughout our lives as far as how you need to do things or how things are supposed to be.

But if you want to do something nobody's ever done before, you're going to have to act differently than people ever had before.

♪ I'd be willing to bet that just about everybody in here uses Google.

That's because Google has this magical ability to take any random string of words, thoughts, ideas, ingredients, and find a way to make sense of it all.

You got only three things in your fridge, Google has a recipe for that.

Maybe your sink is clogged up and you don't have any tools.

Google will show you how to throw together a bunch of household items and solve the problem.

Or maybe you're a powerlifter who is also a law student who is passionate about social advocacy and you want to find a way to combine all three of those things.

Google has a career for you.

So let's back up a little bit.

I've always been into sports.

I swam and played tennis through high school, and I got into lifting weights in college.

One day, I was lifting at the student rec center, and somebody from the powerlifting team just happened to be in that day.

He approached me and asked me if I had ever thought about trying out for the powerlifting team.

I didn't know a whole lot about powerlifting, but the idea of lifting weights for sports seemed like a pretty cool idea.

So that following Sunday, I went to a practice and met the team.

Everybody was so warm and welcoming.

It felt like a real family.

And better yet, they were all working together to get stronger.

So I tried out.

It was a little bit of a bumpy road, but I made the team.

The thing is, collegiate nationals was only eight weeks away from when I joined the team, and they needed me to get qualified because I fit into one of the weight classes that they had vacant.

So after a weeklong crash course in powerlifting, I competed in my first competition and I got qualified.

Seven weeks later, I ended up winning the national championship for my weight class.

(applause and cheering) Thank you.

But it was really all due to the support of my teammates and coach, who took hours out of their own training and their own days to make sure that I was well prepared.

In two months, I had fallen in love with powerlifting and haven't looked back since.

Now, despite being a very type-A kind of person, I have sort of fallen into just about every formative experience in my life.

After high school, I found myself-- a queer, gender-nonconforming, black, first-generation American-- at Texas A&M University, at the time the most conservative public institution in the nation.

(laughter) Now, don't get me wrong.

It worked out really great, and A&M had lessons to teach me that I couldn't have planned for.

Now, to give you some perspective, my freshman year, we had about 50,000 students, and only 1,500 of us were black.

As much as I loved my school, and don't get me wrong, I loved Texas A&M, and I'm proud to be an Aggie, but it could be a really uncomfortable place to be a minority student like myself.

You could really feel it at the football games.

Now, Texas A&M, football is the epitome of the student experience.

The entire town shuts down.

Locals, students, and alumni come and fill the stadium at Kyle Field to support the team.

It's a day of student camaraderie.

We would fill that stadium upwards of 70,000, 80,000, 90,000 people.

It was amazing.

But it was also really hard to look up in the stadium and be able to pick out every single person of color.

It was those experiences that made me realize I wanted to dedicate my life to creating more inclusive communities, not just at Texas A&M, but everywhere.

I had found purpose in social activism.

I wanted to dedicate my life to it, but, you know, passion doesn't put food on the table.

How was I going to make a career out of social activism?

So I went to Google.

After looking through some of the search results, it seemed like law school would be a good place to get the tools I needed to build a career around social advocacy.

Fast-forward a bit.

I'm halfway through my 1L year at Harvard Law.

It's 6:30 in the morning, and I'm sitting in a very empty study lounge, staring at the pages of a case that I had already read two or three times, and was probably going to read again.

I needed to know it inside and out just in case I got cold-called in class.

I started to think about the three-hour training session I was going to have to do later that evening.

Today, like most days, I was going to be on campus from 6:00 a.m. till 5:00 p.m., and then sit in an hour of traffic to get to my powerlifting gym for my training.

I was getting ready for the world championships that summer.

I started to think, you know, I had always felt this connection between powerlifting and law school.

It's a weird connection to draw, but hear me out.

Powerlifting, just like law school, required focus, attention to detail, consistency, practicing the same movements over and over for technical mastery.

But despite this connection I felt, I was living a double life.

I was a law student by day and a powerlifter by night.

I often wondered, would I ever be able to bridge these two worlds that I loved so much?

So I went to Google.

I very awkwardly typed in, "powerlifting, law, social justice."

I didn't really expect much from the search.

I don't think anybody would.

But surprisingly, the first two links that popped up were articles about this organization called InnerCity Weightlifting.

ICW, for short.

ICW is a social enterprise in Dorchester that uses the gym and personal training as a way to work with street- and gang-involved young people.

ICW literally embodied that connection I felt between powerlifting and social advocacy, leveraging the gym as an equalizer.

In the gym, it doesn't matter how many degrees you have, what street you grew up on, or how much money you make.

As my coach used to say, "Strength doesn't care."

So I immediately sent an email to the C.E.O.

and founder, Jon Feinman, and a week later, I found myself in the gym at their Dorchester facility.

I continued to get workouts there throughout my law school... three years.

And I couldn't help but get this familiar feeling that I used to get at the A&M powerlifting gym.

It was a group of people coming together as a family, as a community, to get stronger not only in the gym, but outside the gym.

Now, after three years and some change, diplomas were earned, bars were passed, and now I'm the head of student engagement at ICW.

I still... (applause and cheering) Thank you.

(applause) Now, I still very frequently get the question, "So what are you going to do with your law degree?"

And I get it.

My career path doesn't make sense to a lot of people.

But what they don't realize is, one of the biggest lessons I took away from law school is that traditional methods lead to traditional outcomes.

And, in my view, traditional outcomes haven't really done that much for people of color.

(applause and cheering) I thought law was going to be the way to bring about social change.

But how are we going to solve a problem with the very tools that created it?

Audre Lorde once said, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

Sometimes, in order to make something we've never done before, we have to break away from conventional methods.

My name is Mickey Belaineh.

I am a competitive powerlifter, a barred attorney, and the head of student engagement.

And Google helped me combine my passions to create my dream job, even though it shouldn't have worked.

Thank you.

(applause) (cheering) ANNOUNCER: This program is made possible in part by contributions from viewers like you.

Thank you.

♪