BeachGrit TV: Sabre Norris’ Sugar Dreams!

Come visit the family who defeated ordinariness!

It was two days before Christmas when an eleven-year-old girl called Sabre Norris gifted me the true nature of family. While my own house of cards was collapsing in a welter of sorrow, the foundations made rotten by poor husbandry, hers was exalting in each others’ complexities.

The mother of the four remarkable kids, Brooke, looked at me at one point, maybe we were talking about home-schooling or maybe it was when I walked into the backyard and was in the shadow of a mega skate ramp and three other smaller half-pipes, and said, “We’re actually very straight. We’re not alternative at all.”

In the surf, I’d asked Sabre, whom you’ve seen on Ellen, Today Show etc, what grade she was in.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never been to school. I don’t even know what it looks like in a classroom.”

For the Norris kids, Nazzie, Biggie, Sockie and Sabre, family is a shelter, the walls steeled with respect and love. Each kid has a role, each parent has a role (Brooke is the firm matriarch, pops Justin the juicy clown), and the pack just… succeeds.

My spirit was lofted into the air when Sabre wrote her own version of our day together. 

I figured a story on Sabre would make a slight diversion in our Like Bitchin‘ TV series. I brought along the director Luke Farquhar and photographers Stefan Hunt and Campbell Brown to spotlight, in documentary form, the path the family has taken, and Sabre’s virtuosity at everything.

Watch!