Surviving Life as a Movie Star's Daughter

Talk about being "Out on a Limb."

It's not always easy being the daughter of a celebrated movie star. Sachi Parker should know. She's the daughter of Shirley Maclaine, star of The Turning Point, Terms of Endearment, Guarding Tess, The Apartment and so many films it's hard to recount.

Parker will be performing her one woman show "Lucky Me" — recounting many of her experiences as Maclaine's daughter — at the Burgdorff Center for the Performing Arts in Maplewood this Sunday, May 22 at 3 p.m.

Born in Los Angeles but raised in Tokyo, Parker has led a peripatetic life. She studied in England and Switzerland, worked in Hawaii and France, was engaged to a sheep-rancher in Australia, traveled the world as a stewardess for Qantas Airlines, and finally settled down in Malibu to be with her mother. In Lucky Me, she finally tells the world what it’s like to be the daughter of the most celebrated singing dancing Academy-Award-winning reincarnated spiritualist in this world (and the next).

Parker moved to Japan with her dad, businessman Steve Parker, in 1958 when she was 2 years old. She saw her mother periodically throughout her youth, but never really got to know her until she moved into her Malibu house at the age of 25. From that point on, she learned more about her fabulously talented, famously eccentric mom than anyone could have imagined. 

Written with playwright Frederick Stroppel, Lucky Me is the story of Parker’s long odyssey of self-discovery, as she struggles to reconnect with her mother and escape from her imposing shadow at the same time. It spans the Rat-Pack-Vegas-“Mad Men” world of the 60’s through the free-love consciousness-raising 70’s to the New Age self-absorption of the 80’s and 90’s, finally landing in the present wherever-we-are-now. 

And ultimately, it’s a love letter to a mother who is at once universally beloved and an enigmatic puzzle, a larger-than-life figure who commands the spotlight and yet seems always beyond reach.

Lucky Me is preparing for a New York production in the fall of 2011. It will be presented at the Burgdorff as a semi-staged reading with no intermission, and will be followed by a Q & A session with Parker.

Tickets are $10. For reservations visit www.whatexittheatre.com or call 973 763 4029. The Burgdorff Cultural Center is located at 10 Durand Road, Maplewood, NJ.