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Your Ultra Modern Living Hostess |
Providing party planning, decorating & entertainment
for Mai Tais, Martinis and Other Special Ocassions! |
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All About Cherry Capri
Autobiography
Chapter 7) I'm Going Home
There were fires and mudslides and earthquakes and I just knew I had to go home. Everywhere I went, there had always been something missing.
As Dr. Frank-N-Furter said,
"I’d seen blue skies, through the tears in my eyes. And I realize I'm going home."
I just had to make it up to mom and dad for all the time I was gone.
After touching down at LAX, I rented an old jalopy and drove up the coast. I had been so many years in the desert that I had almost forgotten the familiar feel of the ocean air and it comforted me.
As I drove up to the house, it looked the same; the same shaggy scrubby weeds around the far side and tropical foliage leading up to the door. And the tiki god still stood there guarding the entrance! I rang the bell and waited, but no sound came from the house so I sauntered around the back.
And there it was…. the 1964 Falcon Futura convertible in back yard. I just stood there welling up as I had a vague recollection of how they had promised the car would be mine on my 16th birthday. They hadn’t forgotten and now years later… there it was covered with sun bleached moth ridden moving blankets. Even though I had left, they must have hoped that I would return someday. I started to really regret leaving so abruptly and the tears started to fall.
The back door was locked, but I remembered the secret way to wiggle the handle and I pushed it open.
The place looked like it hadn’t been touched since 1979. A layer of dust was everywhere. And as I entered the front living room, I saw a huge pile of post cards spilling down from under the mail slot. That explained everything. Why I had never heard back from them. All those years... They never read any of them.
A flood of questions bombarded me. Why had they left? Where were they now? Would they ever forgive me for leaving
so abruptly? Were they even still alive? What happened?
The neighborhood hadn’t changed too much. I tried next door to see who was living in the old Parakeet Family house.
The new neighbors told me that the house had been vacant for twenty years. The mobile home park had kept up the exterior
because someone was still paying the community fees, but no one ever came and went from the house.
He said that he had heard that the owners lived somewhere in the San Fernando Valley and wished me luck.
I headed to the Valley not knowing where I would begin my search or what I would find when I got there.
Once again fate intervened. While sitting at a stoplight on Reseda Blvd., there they were! No not them, but I saw their picture advertisement on a bus stop bench. “Call Freddie and Babette – For the Best Deal Yet!” Mom and Dad had gotten into real estate. I immediately turned my car south to head to their office in Encino.
I pulled up to the office on Ventura Blvd. and saw a bright yellow corvette convertible with the plates FRDYVET.
I was a bit nervous knowing I would be like a ghost stepping out of the past to them. I just didn’t know what to think or do, so I just put one foot in front of the other and opened the glass doors to their office.
It was an immediate bond. Thrilled to be reunited, we all hugged and kissed and cried and it was like we were never
separated. They told me how desperate they were and how they could not return home until they found me again; how they
had spearheaded a campaign to put pictures of missing children on milk cartons and showed me the carton with my face
on it. Sure enough, there was my frowning little 11 year old face with a surfboard behind me and a can of sex wax in my hands. I said if they had put the picture on rum bottles, I would have been found right away and sent home!
We all headed back to the beach house together and worked together to open it back up. Hale A’kahele would arise again!
After we settled back at the mobile home Mom said, “You never let us finish the story. You left before we had a
chance to show you what else came on the raft with you.”
She went back out to the car for a moment and came back with a rotten old banana palm leaf that seemed to be wrapped around something.
“There was a care package that came on the raft with the instructions for us to open it when you were 18.
When we opened it, we found a million dollar bills tucked inside a gold lame gown.
We invested it for you in real estate
in the hopes that someday you would come back.”
The millionaire on that island was a very generous fellow after all. I found I was the owner of properties in both L.A. and in Las Vegas. My pad in Los Angeles was a wonderful architectural marvel and I owned a home practically down the street from where I had been renting in Vegas!
We spent a few days together looking through all the post cards I had sent as I regaled them with the tales of my life that lead me back to them. As I shared my story it dawned on me that since I no longer needed to work, I needed to have a new focus for my life. After so much time being on the road and not really having a home to call my own, I realized that nothing was more important than creating a comfortable and happy home base and spending quality time with people you love in it.
Right then and there I decided my life’s mission was to be a cultural emissary to the world; to teach all the things that I had learned about: homemaking and high architecture, entertaining and kitschy crafts, travel and exotica music, esoteric design and Modern Americana.
I decided to bring the world of Glamour home with a capital Gee!
Chapter 8) A Date with Destiny in the Desert
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