Bernadette's," Cha Cha tells us when we first meet her. Cha Cha was, for a few minutes at least, the undeniable star of the show. Watching her on screen, I knew she was the bad girl, the other - the girl, as Frenchie informs us, "with the worst reputation." But she was also a magnetically confident, voluptuous Latina, and to mix my movie allusions here, there was no putting this baby in the corner. Curvy, saucy and dark-haired, she was the mirror opposite of our fair Sandy. Self-conscious about my already-curvy backside (this was way before J.Lo) and my plump lips (also before Rosario Dawson.) I was a dab of cinnamon in a bowlful of vanilla, and I stood out. (I sometimes joked that I was black Irish.) I felt disoriented. Annette Frances Cardona Mini Bio Annette Charles was born on Main Los Angeles, California, USA. after living in Latin America, and my mother had insisted on enlisting me in a parish school where the entrance exam apparently included Irish ancestry. In the suburban Maryland Catholic parochial school I attended at the time, I was the other, too: a dark-haired, dark-eyed girl with a foreign-sounding name in a sea of light-eyed, light-haired McTavishes and Pecks and Flannerys. Those that did exist were often portrayed as the other, as my women's studies professors might have once put it, pushed to the margins of the narrative. And at the time I'm recalling - this was the mid-'80s - there weren't too many representations of Latina women on film and TV. In fact, Charles was a stage name the actress was born Annette Cardona, of Mexican and Italian ancestry. Annette Charles - who played Cha Cha in the 1978 movie ' Grease ' - died last night in her Los Angeles home. It's only now, as I see her character's full name spelled out in online obituaries, that I realize perhaps she was meant to be Italian. annette-charles-cardona-cancer/ stated in Internet Movie Database IMDb ID. As that dance-off unfolded on my living room TV screen, I couldn't take my eyes off Cha Cha: Her screen time was minimal, but, oh my, was she memorable. It was the beginning of my long, and often awkward metamorphosis from little girl to pubescent ball of hormones and budding womanhood. I remember watching Grease when I was 10 or so. Cha Cha dances with Danny Zuko the way it was meant to be.
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