When a newspaper reporter splashes before-and-after photos in her Sunday edition of a wrinkling, graying, overweight 52 year-old math and computer science teacher who now looks like a thin, spooky-beautiful teenager, national TV and press crews scurry to Ojai, California, three hours northwest of Los Angeles, to christen a new international celebrity. The reporter concludes that Kelly Smith Ford's miraculous transformation from grandma to teenager has something to do with vitamins, since Kelly, a vegetarian living a holistic lifestyle, is a vitamin expert who swallows 50 vitamins, supplements, minerals and herbs a day. Kelly Smith Ford calls herself a normal, ordinary woman, a wife, mother, and grandmother at the time she is discovered and unexpectedly thrust into a fourth lifestyle, that of a famous teenager, which she struggles to comprehend, as does her 56 year-old husband. Debates rage among scientific, religious, and other experts on aging and age reversal; some claim she is a fraud because she really can't prove her age. The public clamors for a miracle vitamin from the Beverly Hills vitamin company that hires Kelly as a spokesperson while skeptics ask if this is a PR stunt. The question becomes: has Kelly really reversed the aging process, and if she has, how did she do it, because every woman, and man in the world wants to know how. There are some bizarre contradictions and complexities waiting not only for the public but for Kelly.
About the Author: A college graduate, Mr. Buff attended law school, IBM Computer Programming School, the U.S. Navy's Officer Candidate School, and served as a U.S. Navy officer in engineering and atomic defense on a ship while he lived in Italy and travelled extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East. As a newspaper reporter, he wrote numerous articles on employment, entertainment, travel, crime, business, and politics. For the past 10 years he has attended monthly writers' group meetings with experts on writing as well as special seminars held by IWOSC, Independent Writers of Southern California, where he served on the board of directors; PALA, the Publishers Association of Los Angeles; and Media Bistro. He is a member of Mystery Writers of America. His mainstream novel, A Modern Neanderthal Woman (www.josephtbuff.com) was published in print and online in weekly episodes to AP standards in a Beverly Hills newspaper and could become a movie, or TV series. Mr. Buff was recently filmed in the role of Frank, the father of Dirk, the central character in the movie Malchus, a modern day Mafia plot with Biblical connotations, a "feel good" movie scheduled for release in 2013. He is currently writing the sequel for The Vitamin Queen of Ojai, several short stories, and completing work on two other novels.