Amy J. Moore describes Meeting Cherri
“The sudden appearance of this bright new star, gave me a shocking idea.“
The Cherri project all started with this dilapidated building. I mean it started quite literally for Cinechicks, for it was this building that I was staring at one afternoon when I met a woman named Cherri. She turned to me and said, “I was given an abandoned building. He said that it would change my life.”
I was sitting at the Park Bar in Detroit, eating one of the famous beef shawarmas from their kitchen called, Bucharest Grill. This is possibly one of life’s biggest pleasures. I paused to look at her.
She was staring out of the picture windows, looking like a modern-day Alice in Wonderland. She had a hugely liberated sense of self and of style. She was at once, beautiful, constantly changing in the afternoon light with a stylized, old-school charm. She seemed linked to a glorious past.
We struck up a conversation over a cocktail napkin.
“Who’s he?” I asked.
“Ah,” she smiled mysteriously as if I would never understand. ”He’s the once-in-a-lifetime one.”
She told me that the love of her life had recently been killed in a car accident. I expressed my condolences, but then she went on to tell me something more intriguing. When he died, he had left her this building in Detroit with the explicit instruction in his will that it would transform her life. She could only do one thing. She moved to the city to find out why.
I listened. I was happy to hear what her lover had known. Cherri told me the most amazing story that I’ve heard recently. I think of it all the time.
Cherri is a real-life warrior Princess, the epitome feminine sexuality. She is designing a clothing line, and referred in passing to the article in W Magazine about Detroit’s art scene. She talked of her three closest girlfriends in the city. They had kept her sane during her period of mourning, but each of them had a big hand in her story.
As the afternoon light started to fade, I bought her a drink, hoping to hear more. When she said to me, “smart is sexy, inner strength is sexy, assertiveness is sexy,” I asked her if we could tell her story on the screen. She is the feminization of Detroit, of our steel and steam, cement and dreams.
The sudden appearance of this bright new star, gave me a shocking idea. Not all things can be seen immediately, including the mystery behind Cherri and her crumbling building in Detroit.
Our story of Cherri will change how you look at life, promise and renewal.
