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All About Cherry Capri
Autobiography
Chapter 3) I was a Beachside Cinderella
I ran away from home when I was when I was quite young. I just never felt like I fit in entirely with the surfer crowd.
I certainly couldn’t surf. I was terrified of the water and waves. The one time I tried,
I went over the falls backwards and never wanted to visit the green room again.
I just couldn’t hang ten like everyone else.
And so they made me wax the boards all the time. I guess it was their way of making me feel included,
but at 12 years old, I just thought it was cruel punishment because they didn’t love me. Plus, it ruined my nails.
Sensing my unrest, it was at this point that mom and dad finally sat me down for a serious talk.
I didn’t know what they were going to say. Maybe this was the birds and bees talk I had already heard about
from some of the older kids?
Mom started first telling me how much they loved me and how special I was. Then they pulled out the SOS note
and explained where I actually came from. I was in a state of shock and clarity all at the same time.
All of a sudden everything made sense; why I felt like a fifth wheel on a shiny new t-bird.
Apparently, my biological mother and father had been stranded on an uncharted desert isle with four other people.
What was unusual about the whole thing is that it was videotaped and televised.
It was kind of like an early form of the “Survivor” show only in this case there was no million dollar prize.
Well, actually, there was a millionaire on the island, one of the four other people, who kept throwing around his money to get his way. Eventually they did get rescued at some point only to get stranded on the same island a second time.
My Phd father was a brilliant chemist who was primarily responsible for the stranded castaways surviving.
He earned six college degrees by the age of 25 and was in the process of writing his second book, Fun With Ferns,
when he took the ill fated trip to the island. Once there, he devised all sorts of clever items that kept them alive:
glue from tree sap, coconut powered radio batteries,etc...
One might ask if he was so exceptionally brilliant, how come he could not think of a way off the island.
And the answer of course is – if you were stranded on an island with two beautiful women
(a glamorous movie actress and sexy farm girl Mary Ann) with no male competition to speak of, you’d wanna stay too.
So I like to think of dad as a kind of stealthy sly stud.
Unfortunately though, my mom lost out on a burgeoning career in Hollywood.
She had roles in a number of minor Hollywood films such as the “Hula Girl and the Fullback” “Housewives From Mars,”
and “Belly Dancers from Bali.” She was soon to hit it big on Broadway as the leading role of Cleopatra in
“Pyramid for Two” before taking a doomed 3 hour cruise.
The freaky thing I learned later is that my biological parents first ended up in each others arms when
C.B. Howlie’s mummy visited the island. But that’s a whole 'nother story ...
Like a ton of bricks it hit me. I was living in a tin shack by the beach when my heritage was the stuff dreams
are made of. When my parents were done explaining they left me alone to cry myself to sleep.
I left home the next morning on April 2 when I realized it was not a joke.
