The Long Way Home

I’ve never been much for red carpets and gala fundraisers where more value is placed on my celebrity status than on my honesty; lending my face considered more useful than my willingness to lend a hand. It’s disconcerting to think that after all the effort I put into trying to be a person of great strength and integrity, my usefulness can simply be determined by my “heat;” that Hollywood word used to describe the state of one’s sometimes inexplicable momentum, like centrifugal force that catapults an object in any given direction simply because it is sitting in a slingshot of whirling matter.  All that hype, regardless of how it might pay off in money or contracts or “Fame,” can leave one feeling…doubtful.  Doubtful of her intelligence, strengths, and abilities.  Hype is debilitating.

I needed to get away, away from all of that.  But I didn’t need an escape.  I needed a reality check. Not to bring me back to Earth from some lofty self aggrandizing perspective, but quite the contrary: to remind myself that my value is far greater than any price tag Hollywood is willing (or not willing) to place on me, my face, my body, my talent, my “heat.” After 25 years of Hollywood whirling I just needed to regain my equilibrium, recognize the woman I had become and have faith in her. I needed to discover Nia.    First stop, Sumatra, where exists the greatest threat of volcano eruption, earthquake and as so dramatically demonstrated to the world, tsunami devastation;  A very intentional leap from the frying pan and into that ring of fire.

My writings are not an account of that experience.  They are not a travel log or an adventure journal. I leave that to the more experienced surfers and adventure writers who were on that blasted boat with me. They are a series of snapshots, some shockingly traumatic, others ridiculously humorous, but all incredibly poignant and life altering. It is a candid scrapbook of my Sumatran expedition as well as the often more precarious Hollywood tour that sent me there. From my sudden thrust into stardom on the hit TV series “Fame” through the hit records and failed marriages and on to the number one day time soap. It is the uncanny paralleling of my 25year journey through tinsel town in search of my own identity and the 25day voyage on the Indian Ocean that brought me home. Home to a life I dreamed of as a young girl, home to the man I fell in love with 20 years ago, but most importantly home to me, Nia Peeples.