Melody Damayo
- This article is about a Filipina porn star
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- This article is about a porn star
Melody Damayo is a Filipina porn star better known as Mimi Miyagi.
Early life and education
Damayo was born in Davao City, the Philippines on ✦July 3, 1973, the second of four children to immigrant parents Mike Ariesgado and Luz Damayo, who were both conservative Christians. As a child, Damayo was something of a child prodigy. She spent her childhood studying piano and dreaming of becoming an Olympic gymnast. At the age of six, she moved to the US with her parents and grew up in California.
She was sent back to Mindanao for high school by her parents, who enrolled her in a conservative Seventh Day Adventist Academy in remote Bukidnon province, hoping she would acquire Filipino values.
Damayo made it through high school and enrolled in an Adventist college in the same area, but dropped out after two years. After being a disc jockey on the college radio station, she wanted a career in show business.
She returned to LA just before her 18th birthday with a little over $1,000 to her name. Damayo obtained a scholarship to the American College for Fashion Merchandising, Westwood, Los Angeles, but college was cut short in 1992, when she'd run out of money and began looking for jobs.
When she reached the age of consent, and pursued an adult career, starting with Ed Powers.
Adult film career
Damayo came across an ad looking for nude models and answered it, thus beginning her rise in the adult film industry. She took the name "Mimi" which was her childhood nickname, given her by her grandmother. "Miyagi" was derived from the character Mr. Miyagi from the film The Karate Kid. She cloaked her Philippine nationality in Asian mysticism. Even though she was always the least paid actress on the set, she continued knocking on studio producers' doors. Damayo also underwent surgery several times to increase her natural "B" cup breasts to "DD" size.
She then quit, got married, had a child, started publishing magazines, and running Web sites - all sex-oriented. She started publishing her own men's magazine, Oriental Dolls, (now known as Asian Hotties).
The rise of the internet led Damayo to create a website (which she codes and runs on her own) that went "live" in January 2000. (A previous website, launched before 1996, had been purloined by her hired webmaster, so she created a new one, doing the coding herself.) When "Mimi" first went online, she performed live nude chat daily and had scheduled events. Now, the business is served by a stable of 12 multi-ethnic women performing chat in rotating shifts, freeing her from filling shifts herself. The run for governor helped propel her web enterprise. 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. Now with access to a global public audience, she continued to expand the market for Asian adult films. In 1999, Damayo began doing movie production and talent scouting for Metro Home Video and produced the series she entitled FantAsiany, of which there are now three sequels.
Mainstream films
Nearly bankrupted by her divorce, in September 2003, "Mimi" came out of retirement, and appeared in the adult film Happy Ending (not to be confused with Happy Endings later released by Lions Gate Films).
In May 2005, Damayo began work in her first-bit role in a mainstream comedy, Come Again.
In December 2006, "Mimi" returned to adult films with great fanfare after her failed run on the Republican ticket for Governor of the State of Nevada.
Political career
She attributed her politicization to a nasty divorce and a year-long custody battle for her seven-year-old daughter.
On May 12, 2006, she filed as a Republican gubernatorial candidate in the state of Nevada, under her birth name, Melody Damayo. "I have nothing left to hide, everybody has seen all of me already". she said. One of her slogans was "I'm bare and honest at all times.
She was criticized for running for such a position, given her past profession. However, she claimed that she was entirely out of the business and no longer receives royalties from her work. She faced four other Republican candidates in the primary held on August 15, 2006, and was defeated by a wide margin by Jim Gibbons. After her loss in the primaries, she joined the Libertarian Party.
External links
- Mimi Miyagi's Homepage
- Campaign website
- Melody Damayo collected Wonkette articles and interviews about her gubernatorial campaign
- Mimi Miyagi video interview on burntwire.tv
- Interview at LukeIsBack.com
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