STEVE BOORSTEIN

Read More About Steve Boorstein

The longer story behind his keynotes, including the first career that makes the second one land, and what clinical audiences say afterward.

He Woke From Surgery Unable to Add Two Plus Two →

About Steve Boorstein

Steve Boorstein has lived two lives, and he talks about both of them. In the first he was a television personality, an author and a national brand spokesperson. In the second he is a stroke survivor who had to relearn how to read a book, tie a shoe and find his way home from six blocks away. What he does on a stage is put those two lives next to each other and let a room draw its own conclusions.

His first career was built on service. Steve ran one of the premier dry-cleaning businesses in Washington, D.C., with a clientele that included Supreme Court justices, U.S. presidents, professional athletes, entertainers and diplomats, and more than twenty-five years of it came down to one question he asked over and over: How can I please you?

That reputation made him "The Clothing Doctor." He wrote four books teaching consumers how to care for and preserve what was in their closets, became a spokesperson for Tide, Whirlpool and OxiClean, and appeared on The Today Show, The View, Inside Edition and dozens of other national programs. His articles and interviews ran in Reader's Digest, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Style Magazine and National Enquirer. He keynoted conventions across the clothing and dry-cleaning industry and gave presentations for Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom and Chanel.

Then he retired. Healthy, happy, married thirty years, he and his wife left Bethesda, Maryland, for Boulder, Colorado, looking forward to the next chapter. Two years later, a bizarre skiing accident on the mountain tore a carotid artery. Steve had a stroke on the operating table and woke up in the ICU with left-side paralysis. He could not add two plus two. He could not read four words in a row. His hand, as he tells it, was face-down in the mashed potatoes.

Four years into recovery he started speaking to nurses, physicians and therapists, offering the one perspective a medical textbook cannot supply: what the room looks like from the bed. He gives voice to the loss of identity, the confusion, and the brutal arithmetic of discovering that what was once automatic is now hard, and often impossible. He does it without self-pity and with a great deal of humor, because humor is the piece of his survival kit he says he would not have made it without.

Sitting in his own support group, Steve met survivors using canes, walkers and wheelchairs, and some just emerging from comas, and concluded that his own stroke was a drop in the bucket next to what many of them carried. So he asked whether anyone wanted to be interviewed. Twenty survivors, spouses and caregivers said yes. That became Different Strokes: An Intimate Memoir for Stroke Survivors, Families and Caregivers — two years of writing at the speed his brain could think, published by a New York agent. He has also written a song for survivors and, still in the early stages of recovery, walked onstage and delivered a stand-up set to a standing ovation.

Nearly two decades on, Steve brings something very few speakers can: the view from long after rehabilitation ends, when a person is no longer recovering so much as living, adapting and reinventing. He does not fit neatly into motivational speaker, healthcare speaker or storyteller. He is all three at once, and audiences tend to laugh with him, at him, and eventually at themselves. He lives in Boulder.

• Author of five books, including Different Strokes, an intimate memoir built on interviews with twenty survivors, spouses and caregivers
• National television personality featured on The Today Show, The View, Inside Edition and numerous other programs
• Brand spokesperson for Tide, Whirlpool and OxiClean, reaching millions of consumers as "The Clothing Doctor"
• Presented for Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom and Chanel and keynoted conventions throughout the clothing and dry-cleaning industry
• Keynoted the AtlantiCare Stroke Summit with Jefferson Neurosurgical Associates and a medical convention at Caesars Palace
• Host of the My Stroke Speaks Podcast and a regular guest of hospital stroke support groups, who recommend him on to other hospitals