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brother to me. Which is true. However, it’s also true that we did date once. Okay, maybe twice or more. He asked me out soon after the Donny and Marie show went off the air, and just as the Dukes of Hazzard was a fresh hit show. I went from four years of performing with Been Duped (Donny!) to dating Bo Duke. What a transition.
    John was and still is handsome, funny, and kind-hearted, a combination that’s not always easy to find. However, by the time he asked me out on a date, my heart was already pretty occupied by Steve, the Brigham Young University basketball star whom I was also starting to see. That story continued with a picture-book wedding, but didn’t end with happily ever after, like we had both hoped. By the time this Children’s Miracle Network lunch meeting took place, I’m certain that John Schneider and I were no longer dating. I mean, no one eats tuna fish when they’re trying to flirt. Right?
    Our topic of the day was: How could we help more kids who are physically challenged, sick, or injured? And how would we decide which cause needed the most help? There were hundreds of causes, all important, each needing funding for research and various treatments.
    Years before, my parents had established the Osmond Foundation, a charity to help hearing-impaired children, because my two oldest brothers, Virl and Tom, were born deaf.
    If a newborn appeared to be healthy in the 1940s, he was sent home with the mother with no further tests. Vision and hearing were only routinely tested when a child entered public school. My mother had to make the scary discovery with her first two babies on her own. Virl, the oldest, was showing some signs of speech problems as a preschooler, but she thought Tom was merely a quiet baby.
    My parents had just moved to Ogden, Utah, and my father was devoting eighteen-hour days to setting up a real estate and insurance business. To keep my brothers entertained, he built them a little sandbox in the backyard. Mother told me that she was calling to them one day to come in the house and realized that only Virl looked up at her. Tommy never responded at all.
    After having them tested and finding out that Virl had less than sixty percent hearing and that Tom was almost totally deaf, doctors recommended that they be placed in an institution as soon as they reached school age. This was where my mother put her foot down. Not the first or last time, either! (I think I inherited the best of her headstrong qualities.) She couldn’t bear the thought of having her babies live away from her. As devastating as the news was to her, by the time she arrived home, she had started making a plan.
    Day by day she taught them to speak. She would put her face near to theirs and pronounce words, letting them feel her throat as she spoke. She devised a way for them to hear speech through earphones and a record player. My father painted the kitchen walls with blackboard paint and my mother became their teacher. They were given tap-dance lessons to feel rhythm, and were both so good they ended up teaching the rest of my brothers to dance. She and my father not only taught my two oldest brothers to function well in a hearing world, but they taught the rest of their kids the ultimate blessings that come with helping other people. When my brothers Alan, Wayne, Merrill, and Jay first started singing at professional events as very young boys, it was to raise money to buy the best-quality hearing aids for their older brothers. Later, the funds went to the Osmond Foundation to help other deaf children.
    My parents strongly believed that philanthropy was not only something we could do in our spare time but something that was to be part of our weekly schedules. It was, in their view, as important a time commitment as finding time to eat. One nourished the body, the other the spirit.
    Almost every day during the seventies, a crowd of teenage girl fans would stand vigil outside of whatever house, apartment, studio, or hotel