Cheryl Blue, 58, has a story on her phone. She’ll flash photos of a group of muslim men and women, and tell you about her mother being adopted by a sheik from one of the older muslim sects in England. Then she quickly flips to a photo of Cat Stevens, the British pop singer who converted to Islam and became Yusuf Islam. She’ll tell you about her father’s connections in Hollywood and therefore friendships with famous musicians.

Then follows the next set of photos and a transition to her favorite subject: Gregg Allman. She shows pictures of Allman, then her son Ben, and ask you to see the resemblance. She said her father’s family was related in a distant cousin kind of way, to the Allman family and so they were always around each other and so it’s not strange that she and Gregg had a fling. She says he’s always keeping tabs on her, sends spies out to see what she’s up to, sometimes sends an ocean of flowers to her, and when she had her baby baptized, that all the Allmans showed up, along with Gregg’s close friends, Rosalyn and Jimmy Carter.

What Cheryl does relate that results in less head scratching, is being born near March Air Force Base, traveling the world with a military family, spending formative childhood years in Cardiff, Wales where an art teacher encouraged her efforts at painting horses and flowers. The family moved to San Diego in time for her to attend Crawford High School. She remembers happy years, with a bedroom full of toys and curtains painted with teddy bears. Afterwards she took classes at Grossmont College and became a barber in 1979. She got married in 1981 and kept barbering till her first child was born in 1986; the Gregg Allman love child. The second son was born a few years later. She said her husband could never quite forgive her, so that started their break up; which resulted in him getting the mobile home and her being left to live on the streets.

Currently Cheryl spends most of her daylight hours in the downtown library painting tiny greeting cards that she offers for sale, hoping to supplement her food stamps. She makes cards in the shape of crosses, the star of David and even mosques, so as not to leave any religion out.
“When you’ve homeless you have the free time to create, to be an artist,” she said.

Her older brother is a teacher in San Ysidro. Both her sons are musicians. But like so many homeless adults, she doesn’t want to bother her family about helping her get off the street. She really didn’t want the kids to pursue rock ’n’ roll. She stayed home baking bread, making friends in the neighborhood and doing volunteer work at the church, and even tried to home school her children with Christian overtones.

She likes miniature books, and has a few of her own that she keeps in a plastic container so they don’t get broken. She also collects pieces of cloth and when she has enough, will hand stitch them together to make quilts that she sleeps under when she’s out on the street, or even when she finds a program where she can stay indoors for a while.

She suffers from peripheral vascular disease and therefore can’t stand for long periods of time, This month she began to receive SSI disability for the first time. She hopes that will make it possible to save enough money to get a place of her own some day. But she’s not too stressed about it. “I can’t predict the future,” she said. “I try not to worry about tomorrow.”