Lick Me: How I Became Cherry Vanilla

On Saturday, December 4, 2010, the Watermill Center is pleased to welcome Cherry Vanilla for a reading and discussion of her recently published memoir Lick Me: How I Became Cherry Vanilla. The memoir answers this question by way of the Copacabana in the fifties, Madison Avenue, the Fillmore East, Andy Warhol, David Bowie and the Police.

“Music is the glue that held Vanilla’s life together and took her on this joyous, juicy journey from groupie to superstar to RCA recording artist. And in Lick Me, she lays it out before you with the uncomplicated authenticity of a rock and roll song – the kind that takes you instantly to another time and place, the kind that you can’t get out of your head once you hear it.”
—Chicago Review Press

About Cherry Vanilla

Born in Queens, New York, Cherry Vanilla began her career in the 1960s as a producer of radio and TV commercials, while also DJing at clubs in Manhattan and on the French Riviera. By the ’70s, after gaining notoriety as a rock & roll groupie, she’d become an underground actress and played the title role in Andy Warhol’s Pork at the Roundhouse Theatre in London. This was followed by a two-year stint as David Bowie’s PR lady and roles in three more plays in New York and Berlin. In 1974, Vanilla self-published the book Pop Tart Compositions and launched her career as a performing poet. By 1977 she was writing songs and touring Europe with her own rock band, which included Stuart Copeland and Sting of the Police. She released two albums on RCA UK, Bad Girl and Venus d’Vinyl. In the 1980s and ’90s, she wrote for magazines worldwide, while also running one of the first phone-sex services in America and doing film projects with jazz great, Chet Baker and fashion photographer, Bruce Weber. In 1995, she moved to California, where she worked for director, Tim Burton, before establishing Europa Entertainment, Inc., the US office for composer, Vangelis, which she still oversees from her home in Hollywood. Lick Me, her saucy memoir, is the story of her life in show business, from the birth of rock & roll in the USA to the height of the punk rock scene in the UK.