April Sundance

Sundance was born in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union. Her parents were both surgeons, and her grandmothers were also doctors. She was five when Ukraine gained independence. Two years later, with the gates finally open, her father took all the family money and fled to Germany. He not only left his wife and two children to start all over on their own, he left several unpaid debts with the Russian mafia.

“They tried to kill us,” Sundance said. “We had nothing to give them and nowhere to run.” Eventually that mafia boss ended up in prison and the pressure was eased a bit. His mother started a second business sewing and designing fashionable dresses and marketing them. Her sister followed in the family footsteps and became a surgeon.

But Sundance was different, in many ways. She wanted to become a transgender person, and experiment with an edgier lifestyle. None of that was possible in Ukraine. So she fled the country in 2013, leaving a good job as a t.v. editor for a news organization.

For the last five years she has fulfilled part of her dream and made the transformation to female. She has also found crystal meth to be the cheapest and best high on the streets of San Diego. “For $3 you can get really high. For $10 you can stay high for a week,” she said. “It’s like having great sex, only better. It makes you think of reality in a different way. You stay smiling for days. Meth is the best drug anywhere.”

That being said, Sundance is committed to getting sober. She has dreams of becoming a Hollywood movie producer and knows it takes concentration and commitment.

She was clean for the last four months, until last week when she met someone and wanted to spend the night with him. He had some meth and Sundance relapsed hard. She was awake for five days. The fatigue and the drug made her crazy and violent. She was arrested and sent to a mental health hospital where she was so violent she threw a bottle of her urine at a staff person. They gave her a shot of something to settle her down and she was finally released onto the streets with the clothes on her back and nothing else, not even shoes, the day it began to rain for the first time all winter season.

Her first move was to call a local crisis house and ask if there was room for her. She has an appointment this week, and hopes it will be a turning point.

“I have my plans, my goals, my education. I want to stay clean. It’s really not hard. If you have a dream and there is something you really want to accomplish, it’s not hard to stay sober,” she said. “I want to get to Hollywood. I want to be a movie producer,” she said, starting to jump up and down with excitement at the thought. “I want to be a producer, I need to be in Hollywood. First I need to sober up.”