FROM TEEPEE TO EASY E

My name is Buffy Charlet (yes, that’s my real name) and I live in Los Angeles with my dog Bella, better known as Snoots N’ Toots…you get the picture. I'm a writer and actor who sometimes does random shit to supplement the bills. Yep, that old cliché.

It wasn’t always this way though. Of course not. Everyone has a story. My story, like so many, is complex and tangled, but here’s the gist: I was born in a basement in Floriston, CA, the only child of two legitimate hippies. Let me explain, they didn’t just do drugs and wear bell-bottoms. They did drugs, wore bell-bottoms, lived on a commune, grew all of their own food, studied every spiritual text written by man and literally gave peace a chance.

Mom & Pops, livin' off the land.

I grew up on this commune until I was 6 years old. My best friends were chickens and goats and the only piece of clothing I even considered wearing was a pink tutu, but I preferred the nude.

That's me, riding a goat.

In the summer we slept in a teepee and for my first winter we slept in an old, yellow school bus my parents converted into a bedroom. Deluxe. After I was a year old though, we slept in the teepee year round, mountains of snow and all.

Our teepee. That's me swaddled in front.

Our school bus

Then we moved to the city: Reno, Nevada. If you think visiting Tokyo is shocking, try moving to civilization at nearly 7 years old. I was mainly concerned with fitting in and I had a litany of new things to learn: television, McDonald’s, and sleeping in a house. And then a year after our move, my parents divorced.

Cut to, my teenage years. Growing up with a single mom, who was going back to school to finish her degree, I started cleaning houses at 13 for $3.00/hr. At 16 I bought my first car for $1000. It was a pimp, purple ’76 Volvo Sedan. You could actually see the pavement whizzing by through a hole in the floorboards. It was awesome. Freedom. And in the Volvo, (who for no apparent reason I affectionately named “The Big Tuna”) I became obsessed with hip hop.

The Big Tuna, after her big paint job.
I dabbled in hip hop in my pre-teens with Sir Mix-a-Lot and Coolio, but there was something about being able to blast it so loud that it made my ears hurt, in my own car that just made me immediately fall in love with everything hip hop. I really can’t explain it. Maybe it was what hip hop represented to me—achieving your dream when you aren’t given a shot in hell. Or maybe it was just the sic beats. Whatever it was, through The Big Tuna’s tiny factory speakers I would blast tapes of Ice T, Tupac, and Naughty By Nature.

I’d roll into Reno High’s parking lot blaring Easy E. Then I’d walk to class in an old pair of my Mom’s 501’s, Birkenstocks and a t-shirt that I bought for 25 cents. I was a walking incongruity. But I wasn’t trying to be anyone who I wasn’t; people aren’t all one thing and nothing else. Simply, I was a girl who stayed up at night crying about rainforest deforestation who just happened to know all the words to “O.G. Original Gangster.”

Since then, I’ve graduated from college, been through multiple post-graduate acting and writing programs, lived in San Francisco and for the past seven years, lived in Los Angeles. I’m trying to remain true to my dream of becoming a professional artist amidst the multitude of crap jobs in the meantime. All in all though, I remain a hippie from the commune who loves me some hip hop. I’ll be 80 and shaking my ass to Notorious B.I.G’s “Party and Bullshit” while I eat my Tofurky sandwich.

My 30th Bday. Yes, that's a boombox necklace.