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After a few years in New Mexico, the Bordelons moved back to Louisiana, where Leigh graduated from high school. She was accepted to nearby McNeese State University, where she took classes, she says, in "boys, booze, and pool." After she lost her financial grant for flunking too many courses, Bordelon landed a job working the graveyard shift at a gas station. One night, a group of door-to-door magazine salespeople stopped in. They liked her personality and asked her to join them. In 1986, the job took her to San Francisco.
"She was selling magazines all over the country, and one day she called and said, 'I'm in San Francisco,'" says Bordelon's mother. "That was it. She's been there ever since."
Bordelon is estranged from most members of her family, and she says her childhood was difficult. "I had no self-esteem, and my dad used to say, 'You're useless.'"
She believes her turbulent youth led her to marry an overly controlling man; she claims that her ex-husband -- whom she calls "Satan" -- prohibited her from going to church on Sundays. "Before, I had no friends," she says. "I was confined to Satan's whims. I quit going to church because he believed I was having an affair with the choir director. I didn't believe in myself, or that anyone liked me."
Then Bordelon had a pre-Ya-Ya revelation. "I used to have crooked teeth," she says. "I saved up and got my teeth straightened, and someone said to me, 'You could stop traffic with that smile!' And I thought, 'Wow, I don't have to take his shit.' I didn't have to take shit off of nobody."
Bordelon left her husband in 1994 -- and lost her job a month later. Determined to keep her two young children fed, she worked five part-time jobs at once (two during the week and three on the weekend) and borrowed money from one of her supervisors until she could get on her feet.
Her new life was difficult but empowering, she says. In 1996, Bordelon met her current husband, Mark Eris, at a San Ramon nightclub, and her life continued to change for the better. Yet she insists that her miraculous transformation didn't occur until she discovered Divine Secrets while watching a cable TV special on Rebecca Wells.
Bordelon was initially attracted to the book's Southern setting, but she soon found that lines like "It's life. ... You just climb on the beast and ride" and "My mother's love isn't perfect. My mother's love is good enough" taught her to make the best of the challenges that come to her.
"The best way to explain it is the real her has come out," Eris says. "Now when you meet Leigh, you meet Leigh, you don't meet the person that was a result of other people's molding. She doesn't have that blocker anymore, the, 'Oh, I can't think that way because of the church, or my daddy didn't raise me this way.' It's, 'I can think this way, I can do what I want.'"
Eris even helped Bordelon come up with her official Ya-Ya "princess name": Her Royal Highness Fed Up to Here. "I said, 'How about "Fed Up to Here"?'" Eris recalls. "Because she's done with the junk. She's done with the stupidity."
The Ya-Ya Sisterhood made Leigh a leader -- and indeed, she's often the life and the hostess of the party. "Imagine being shy, not having friends or self-esteem," she says. "Then some book you read helps you make friends, lifts you up, and people are turning to you, and people are putting up posts [on the Internet] to tell you that they love you. You don't take that for granted."
Bordelon has even begun questioning her dad's brand of religion. "My father was an ordained deacon in the Catholic Church. And he would beat the holy shit out of us. Is he in heaven?"
Among the summer blockbuster films of 2002 was Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, and a movie theater in Dublin, Calif., was to be among the first to screen it. When Bordelon and the Zeau Zeaus caught wind of the screening, they did what came naturally: threw a party.
The night has become legendary, consolidating the Zeau Zeaus' presence in the Ya-Ya world. "It solidified with the core group that we're not going anywhere," Bordelon says. "It showed the rest of the world, 'Look, we can make a movement.'"
The event was the result of weeks of scheming. For the pre-film party, Bordelon scored hotel rooms and a conference room a few hundred feet away from the theater. She organized the Zeau Zeaus into committees: Some planned the menu (deli platters and copious amounts of alcohol), while others assembled gift bags filled with T-shirts, window decals, and a CD. Bordelon found prizes for a raffle (tapes of the book and film posters) and made post-movie dinner reservations at a local chain Mexican restaurant for 85 women and a few men.
The Ya-Yas began arriving in droves from around the country on June 6, two days before the party. Bordelon couldn't get the day off work, but she says she was prepared for the crowd. As she describes it, she rushed home during her lunch break to greet new arrivals, taking a shot of tequila with the gathering throng before hurrying back to work. She'd also scored two 5-gallon buckets of chicken parts for a massive barbecue in her back yard.
The main event was set for the evening of June 8, though the women had arrived at the hotel by midmorning to set up and primp. Some showed up in cocktail dresses and ball gowns, their ensembles completed with tiaras and neon-colored boas. Bordelon donned a red satin dress with spaghetti straps and slits up both sides, accessorizing with a pearl necklace, long black gloves, and a beauty-queen sash that read "Her Royal Highness Fed Up to Here."
