On the night of December 10, as an EF4 tornado ripped through Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee and finally reached Kentucky, April Wright was huddled with her family in the basement of her grandmother’s home. She’d only recently left her barbershop, Fresh Cuttz, in Mayfield for the day, finishing up with her last customer. She saw the wind blowing, turned on the local news, and decided that they needed to seek shelter.
Across town, in the nursing home where Teresa Sullivan works as a nurse, she was moving residents into the hallway for shelter. She played music to help keep them calm. In Teresa’s home in downtown Mayfield, her husband and 12 others sat together in their basement, praying for the best.
The next day, both April and Teresa would find devastation waiting for them.
At daylight, April and her partner Jessica got into April’s truck and tried to make their way to Fresh Cuttz to see how bad it was damaged.
It was afternoon before Teresa could finally make her way home.
Even weeks later, neither can find words for the pain. Teresa says she was in a fog, barely able to process the amount of damage to the home she’d lived in for six years. For April, the pain is still fresh.
“When the sun came up…oh man…it’s just overwhelming,” April says.
She sometimes trails off mid-sentence. In her mind, you can tell that April is still in that morning.
“We could see that there was some damage but until we got up by Dominos…”
“I’m still trying to take it in,” April says.
April and Jessica parked several blocks away and walked on foot to her shop. Power lines were still falling around them.
“People were crying,” she recalls. “I thought, this is real, this is like a bomb went off.”
“I never in a million years dreamed it was anything like that.”
While April and Teresa awoke on December 11 without a home and without a business, when the sun rose 1,045 miles away in sunny Miami, a team of dreamers had awoken without a dream.
Since September, Charlie Rocket and his team of “dream hitchhikers” had been on the road, living in an RV, roaming America granting dreams for people who needed them most. Together with their 7million+ social media following nicknamed the “Army of Love,” Charlie and his team are the wish-granters who make up the Dream Machine Foundation. They raise money for people who are down on their luck, homeless, or suffering from a debilitating medical condition. They ask, “What is your dream?” And then they set about making it come true.
But, the team had no one to make a dream come true for. They had no idea where to go next.
Charlie and his team awoke like much of America that day, with early images of the devastation of the historic Quad State Tornado running 24/7 on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. They saw people like April and Teresa standing on the streets sobbing in front of piles of brick and twisted metal. They heard of the people searching for survivors in the candle factory that took a direct hit. They saw the Mayor of Mayfield saying that her town was leveled, but the people were strong enough to rebuild.
Charlie heard the word rebuild and knew that the town and its people would need funds to do that. And he knew that his “Army of Love” would help if he asked. But, the team had never responded to a natural disaster. It would be a huge departure from the norm for them.
He called the group together.
“We didn’t bat an eye at the idea,” recalls Dream Machine Foundation Tour Manager Ike Weins, who spoke to me while the team was still on the ground in Mayfield. “We packed all our suitcases up, loaded the bus, and we drove 20 hours to get here.”
“We didn’t even stop. We just drove from our last gas stop straight into Mayfield. We wanted to see it firsthand and see what we were up against.”
“When we left Miami, we said we wanted the name to be Rebuild the Dream Fund. Coming here, we just have to get people’s lives back to normal.”
“We didn’t have a plan when we arrived; we just knew we were going to raise money and start dispersing it. That’s exactly what we did.”
Are You For Real?
On December 16, when the Dream Team arrived, they started meeting people and making dreams come true right away. Along the way, they met April and Jessica, who were on their way home from a family Christmas celebration. April drove up by the huge, painted bus and gave the team a thumbs up. She didn’t know who they were—didn’t know who Charlie was—only that they were one of many who had traveled in to help her community recover.
“I said, ‘I just want to say thank you for everything you are doing for the community. We thank you for being here,’” she says.
They started talking, and Charlie asked April and Jessica what they’d lost in the storm. They asked if they could see what was left of Fresh Cuttz.
He asked April what her dream was.
“I told him I’m already kinda living my dream,” she says. “My dream was being a barber and telling my story and maybe trying to help somebody else or change somebody by a haircut.”
“I’m tearing up and telling him how barbering changed my life.” April is back in the moment as she tells me the story.
Then, Charlie did something a little strange. He asked April for a haircut. In her shop, with no walls left, Charlie asked if she could give him a trim.
For April, it was the highest honor. By then, she’d learned that Charlie was a former music mogul who’d produced albums for some of her favorite hip hop artists. She knew that he had a huge following on social media. Giving this guy a haircut, April reasoned, might be one of the highlights of her career.
“I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “I was feeling so honored, so privileged, just to be able to do his hair.”
“We are sitting outside in this rubble right where my shop was, and I’m just so focused, and I’m happy; I’m on a whole other level. I’ve forgotten about what has happened. I was just happy and content right there with him, doing what I love to do.”
Charlie was pleased with his haircut, and he offered to pay April for her services. She told him she usually charged $25 or $30.
Then came the real shock.
Charlie said, “How about I pay you $30,000 to rebuild your shop?”
In the video, April’s face is priceless. Almost inaudibly, she whispers,” Are you for real?”
“Girl, I just broke down,” she says. “I was just blown away. I can’t describe the feeling.”
My Heart Might Burst From Joy, Just From Loving People
Back over on the other side of the historic court square that was leveled by the tornado, Teresa and Gary had spent three days trying to salvage anything they could out of their destroyed home. They dug their cars out from underneath mounds of rubble.
Teresa says the early days were a fog. She never even took time to change out of her uniform from work at the nursing home. The family was blessed with a camper to live in for temporary housing.
They received countless blessings of supplies—clothing and necessities they needed to get by. And during that time, Teresa did what she has always done.
“My mom and daddy were givers, I’ve seen giving my whole life,” she says. “That’s my heart’s cry is to give. It’s not just money but doing things for people. Whatever needs to be done to help take the load off – make them smile.”
She’s always liked to do what she calls “gift boxes,” where she’ll find things on sale and make boxes for people with things they need or things they may want. She buys groceries for people in line behind her. She babysits, helps her friends move, shows up for visits when friends might need them.
“I’ll just do whatever is on my heart,” she says. “That’s just me.”
“Even during the things I’m going through now, I’m getting blessed, so I have been giving my blessings away, and I’m taking them and finding people who need them during this time.”
Like April, Teresa didn’t know about Charlie Rocket and his Dream Machine. She didn’t know they were in her hometown, and she certainly didn’t know that they had their sights set on her family.
Her granddaughter Paige, her daughter Tandy Jo and her sister Beth had all written to Charlie about Teresa and Gary. Paige, she said, was worried about her grandmother. When the family members conspired to get Teresa and Gary to the site of their former home to meet the Dream Machine, and Charlie Rocket asked Teresa his famous question, she had only one answer.
“I want to be able to help others.”
The Dream Machine team got to work. They followed Teresa’s example. The video shows them shopping in the local Wal-Mart and gathering supplies to make a few of her famous gift boxes.
At their home, with just bricks and boards behind her, Teresa soon got the gift box of her life. The first that Charlie presented had money to help Teresa rebuild her home.
“I hollered when they gave me $20,000 in that red, beautiful box,” she says. In the video, she does a little dance, jumping up and down waving her hands.
But suddenly, there were more boxes. The Dream Machine Foundation had also prepared five boxes with $5,000 each that Teresa could use to bless others who needed it.
“I’m telling you, I boohooed when I found out that I was going to be able to give away $5,000 to five different people,” she says. “I had the ugliest cry. I lost it.”
“Since we got here, the story isn’t about us,” Ike says. “It isn’t about what we do, it’s about our opportunity to help the community around us.”
“What better people to help than the community itself? If they can hand out money that we raised with us, then that makes the moments all the more special.”
Teresa was quick to get to work blessing others with her Dream Machine funds. She knew where to start.
“I really prayed about them—I prayed about who was going to give me the names,” she says. “With each one, I had three references, and that was the Lord talking to me for me to realize that I was supposed to give them that box.”
“Each one, the Lord was the one that did it. When you hear these stories, and you know that God wants these people to have that money, that’s what’s amazing.”
“It was so awesome to give those boxes,” she says.
“I’ve always said that if God hadn’t made my heart so perfectly, it might burst from joy just from loving people.”
We Are Still Speechless…
It truly would have been enough if the Dream Machine had pulled up after blessing Teresa, April, and the others with their new dreams. But they did the opposite; they doubled down. They helped a local restaurant buy a new food truck so they could feed more people during recovery efforts. They surprised a family with a full Christmas complete with TVs and video game consoles for the kids, tennis shoes, and toys. They’ve granted wishes for more than two dozen people or families.
“When we ask people around the country what their dreams are, they can be wide-ranging answers, but when we’ve come here, their answers are that they just want a home or a place to live again,” Ike says. “After talking to them, we get to know them, and we find unique ways to surprise them or make it that much more of a special dream.”
According to Ike, the Dream Machine team members have adapted well to their new tragedy-response role.
“We do come with a huge sense of gratitude and positivity and delusional optimism with our team—we’re just a bunch of kids in a bus, and we are overly ecstatic about life every day,” he says. “We had to change the context of why we are coming into town knowing that what happened is devastating and it is a tragedy, but we wanted to bring some hope.”
“Every day we pull into town, we are still speechless; I can honestly say that.”
Ike says the team has been heartened by hearing all of the stories from residents about Mayfield pre-December 10.
“Everyone we talk to says how beautiful and gorgeous a city it was and how much life there was and how it was a cool town,” he says. “We never got to see that or experience that, but it’s really important to us that we are at least a small part of the process to bring that back to life.”
“For our team, it’s all about rebuilding and bringing hope to a sad situation. And accepting where things were at on December 11 and moving forward thereafter.”
Moving forward looks different for everyone in Mayfield and Graves County now. For some, the future still looks like a black hole of uncertainty. But for April, Teresa, and the dozens of people that the Dream Machine Foundation blessed, there is a sense of optimism.
Hope even.
April, who has the plans and the funds now to bring Fresh Cuttz back to the community, bigger and better, still sometimes grapples with the reality of it and the overwhelming graciousness she feels.
“It was an experience that I am just so very grateful for and thankful for,” she says. “And I’m glad for all the people that he’s helped. I think it’s wonderful that he has so many followers that really believe in him and believe in changing people’s lives and helping to make dreams come true.”
“It’s amazing.”
Teresa knows something of that feeling herself.
“Charlie has the kindest, most gentle, soothing voice,” she says. “It’s just like I heard my Father God directly speaking to me. That’s how kind Charlie’s voice is.”
“To see the compassion from every member of their team, it’s the most unreal thing you’ve ever seen in your life.”
“It’s not been an easy road, but God sure has been good.”
Even though Charlie’s Team of dream hitchhikers had to leave Mayfield to return to their homes and their lives, they left town, continuing to ask the “Army of Love” for funds to do more for the people of Mayfield and Western Kentucky.
If you ask, Charlie’s team now has a dream of their own.
“To us, I know, we are all looking forward to coming here six months from now or two years from now,” he says. “And seeing not where our money went, but reconnecting with these people in general and seeing Mayfield as a flourishing community again.”
The Army of Love Needs YOU!
If you would like to help Charlie and his Dream Machine Foundation make even more dreams come true in Western Kentucky, you can visit www.rebuildthedreamfund.com.
On their website, YouTube, Instagram, or Tik Tok, you can watch Teresa and April’s stories as well as others who have been helped by the Rebuild the Dream Fund and the Dream Machine Foundation.
Follow Charlie and the Dream Machine on Instagram or Tik Tok (@Charlie) to see how they continue to fulfill Charlie’s dream and dedication to helping others achieve their dreams.
