The Mimi Miyagi Melody
Melody Damayo is a forceful, well- spoken Filipino-American, a 2006 Republican gubernatorial candidate in the state of Nevada, who favors getting tough on crime, upgrading schools and improving the state’s infrastructure to battle terrorism.
Mimi Miyagi is a dolled up anime creature whose fire red lips, Jessica Rabbit body, long black hair and willingness to strip naked and let men (and women) have their way with her in any combination imaginable turned her into a bankable porn star and a male-fantasy vision of Asian womanhood - desirable, insatiable and eager to please.
Improbably, they are the same person.
In a string of movies with names like Seoul Train, Fantasian and Beverly Hills Geisha, Mimi Miyagi became a staple of the pliable Asian sex goddess genre. But then she quit the adult film business, became a web site entrepreneur and started selling her sexed-up image directly to fans. She ran a magazine called Oriental Dolls devoted to Asian porn, and promoted herself by dancing and being outrageous in strip clubs. The profits, she says, went to her instead of porn movie producers and fueled her entrepreneurial dreams.
“A girl only has three or four years of being really hot in the porn business,” she says. “I am one of the lucky ones who can continue to live off of it.” She models herself after Bettie Page, the outrageous pin-up and soft-porn queen of the 1950s who became a cult figure and was the subject of the 2005 movie The Notorious Bettie Page, starring Gretchen Mol. “Bettie is an idol of mine,” Damayo says.
Certainly the odyssey that transformed Melody Damayo into Mimi Miyagi has a certain cinematic arc to it. She was born in Davao City on the island of Mindanao, Philippines in 1973 and came to the US with her conservative Christian parents at the age of six, growing up in California. She claims to have been a child prodigy and classical pianist, but somewhere along the way she got a little wild and her parents sent her back to Mindanao for high school, enrolling her in a conservative Seventh Day Adventist academy in remote rural Bukidnon province. “They wanted me to have Filipino values,” she said.
It didn’t work out that way. Damayo made it through high school and enrolled in an Adventist college in the same area, but dropped out after two years, bitten by the show business bug after being a disc jockey on the college radio station. She returned to Los Angeles with dreams of becoming a Hollywood star. She soon ran out of money and answered an ad looking for adult actresses. She was 18.
She kept her childhood nickname, Mimi, which her grandmother gave to her, and appropriated Miyagi from Mr. Miyagi, the martial arts tutor from the Karate Kid movies. “I am a total action movie junkie,” she says. Then she had her breasts “done” and took on the look of a wild girl, up for anything, anywhere as she entered the grind-and-moan video factories that dot the valleys east of Hollywood.
“As a teenager, nothing is really a shock,” she says of her initiation into the porn business. “I was so young. Eighteen is really too young to go into porn and at that age you are not thinking about what lies ahead.”
She starred in dozens of movies and was soon one of the best-known porn actresses in the US. She buried her Filipino identity behind the fabricated pan-Asian synthesis of sex and sizzle, leaving fans to wonder if she was Japanese, Chinese, Korean or what-have-you. Until now, web site chat rooms devoted to such nonsense bristle with chatter about Mimi with fans musing about her “real” nationality and some even doubting her claim to be Filipino.
Then she quit. She got married, had a child, started publishing magazines and running web sites - all sex oriented. But a nasty divorce and a year long custody battle for her seven-year-old daughter politicized her. In court documents, she publicly revealed for the first time that she was Filipino and wrote about her experiences on her blog. Claiming to have been bankrupted by the ordeal, she also came out of retirement to appear before the cameras for one last do-everything role in the film 2003 film Happy Endings. “I don’t know,” she said of her last porn romp, “It’s kind of like a football star. I wanted to see if I could still do it.”
Having had her last hurrah, she quit for good, she says, and stepped up the sale of Mimiabilia of various kinds on her web site, while also starting to land a few roles in low budget movies in which she keeps her clothes on. In the context of web commerce, the run for governor was a good business move. Indeed, she says that after an appearance on an MSNBC talk show in the US to discuss her candidacy with conservative host Tucker Carlson, the response was so overwhelming that her Web server crashed for several hours.
With service restored, there are plenty of Mimi mementoes on offer - from campaign tee shirts on the fairly tame governor web site to a host of products on the “official” site dedicated to her adult endeavors. Life size plaster casts of the “famous and well known butt that all her fans came to love and want,” are available for a mere US$400. They come in a choice of four colors and for another US$75 you can have it delivered in an air-brushed flesh hue that “makes Mimi’s skin tone come to life.” Also on her site are links to a porn-star auction that offers various bits of lace she has worn in her movies.
“There really are some guys out there who are obsessed with everything Mimi,” is how she explains the interest in replicas of her body and other items. “And God bless them for it.”
She has been so busy, she says, that she has remained single and has no love interest in her life. She hopes that a “first man” will prove attractive to her.
Maybe it is time to settle down. Damayo knows that the clock is running and that soon the Mimi Miyagi show will shut down for good. No matter how hard you work at it, nude modeling and stripping only last so long. She is taking method acting classes to fine tune her skills as an actress and hopes that more serious parts in bigger budget films come her way soon. If not, she says, she has her skills in glamour makeup and the internet business. “I will always have something to fall back on.”
And what else is she looking forward to, after losing the race for governor of Nevada? When she quits adult entertainment for good, she plans to lose the 36DD breast implants. “I will be excited when I can leave this kind of entertainment business behind for good,” she says. “I get really awful backaches.”