Alyssa H. Kang

In a regular family garage turned into a band practice area, four youngsters jam. The warm sun struggles to stay on the face of the 11-year-old vocalist as he leaps into the air with a gleaming black guitar. Swinging his head of golden curls, he passionately sings the Green Day song in a childish off-tune … “I walk this empty street, on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.”

A guitarist with darker curls and a bassist with stouter form also jams while an older boy swings his drumsticks. In a garage with a jumble of ladders, spray cans, tools, household odds and ends and a family of bicycles hung upside down from the ceiling, the band has managed to squeeze amplifiers, drums, guitar and music stands on a floor of spider web cables.

While the 'rock and rollers' sing with their bodies as much as with their instruments, an older woman sits alone in a blue camping chair facing them. With sunglasses crowning her head and a sweating pink glass of ice water in hand, she watches intently as the band, 'Loud Chemistry,' displays its skills.

“Guys, you’ve improved a lot since last practice,” she shouts out when the song ends with a guitar’s zhiinnnggg. “Which song do you want to go over next?”

The woman is Terri Lynn Raridon and she is the vocalist Ryan Maddox’s mother. “I have officially become the band’s momager,” Raridon explained.

Raridon proudly calls herself a 'life-aholic' and 'activity-junkie.' At first glance, she seems to be a regular mom, spending hunks of her time to help nurture the dreams of her son. However, the areas of her involvement stretch across things that would be most unusual to be grouped together. Her fields of interest are movement, wildlife and family. Looking closer at the underlying subcategories only furthers the peculiarity of this cheerful woman. However, her genuine commitment to things that truly interest her and her willingness to spend every moment immersed in them makes her a living example of carpe diem.

“Mine is a very happy, busy life,” she says. Raridon most literally scurries from activity to activity throughout a typical day in her gold Chevrolet SUV crossover donned inside in leopard print. “I just love to be busy,” Raridon says, “it’s like I tell people to just try and keep up with me - either keep up or get out of my way!”

One of the gold Chevy’s most frequent destinations is Forbidden Fruit, a sex shop down on North Loop Boulevard. Inside, the store’s pink and purple walls display an assortment of whips, blindfolds, lingerie, party items, lubricants, and various adult toys. “Keeping Austin kinky since 1981,” boasts Forbidden Fruit’s website banner. Raridon has been associated with the store for 31 of those years and has owned it for 26 years.

For Raridon, Forbidden Fruit is not just a moneymaking business but a stepping-stone to her passion: movement. Graduating as a dance major from the University of Texas at Austin in 1983, her goal in life was to be a professional dancer. Fellow dancers advised her that the store would finance her dance habit, leading her to purchase it once she got out of college. From then on, Raridon joined the Invisible Inc. Dance Company, gleaning her skills in musical choreography as well as jazz and modern dance. Today, she celebrates her love for dance as a guest choreographer and consulting artistic director for the Texas Burlesque Festival, which she has been involved in for nine years.

Her love for movement did not stop there but led her to become a yoga professor for Austin Community College. “Ever since I was 3 years old, there were two things I knew I always wanted to be,” Raridon recalls. “One was a teacher and one was a dancer.” To her, she gets to combine the best of both worlds. It is another joy in her life to watch blind, autistic and disabled students come to her classes and experience a sense of inter-connectedness through movement.

The Chevy, at times, becomes an ambulance for little creatures as this energetic woman is also a licensed wildlife rehabilitator. For 16 years, she has been working with small mammals, especially raccoons. Any time throughout her busy day, Raridon receives S.O.S phone calls concerning eyes closed, ears pinned, newly-born raccoons or ill animals with distemper needing to be put down.

The backyard of the sex shop is the wildlife rehabilitation site of the Bill Hicks Foundation, for which Raridon is the administrative director. Oddly, the foundation and shop function together because the shop has proved to be a good central location to receive wildlife needing attention. Not to mention, the excuse of rehabilitating wildlife proved to be a good sidestep of the Texas Obscenity Act before it was discontinued.

The backyard of the shop is set up with six-foot cages, with interiors equipped with swinging crates and empty cabinets for its inhabitants to play in. Although unoccupied in the meantime, Raridon foresees that the cages will be filled with raccoons once they start producing young. “Once it is the season, it will explode here,” she says, “and before I know it, I will be inundated with raccoons. The most raccoons I have had in my care at any one given time was 55.”

But most of all, the gold Chevy’s primary passenger is Raridon’s beloved son Ryan, who, like his mother, has a very busy schedule to attend to. Raridon, acting as the elementary student’s manager, carts him to and from school, flag football practice, guitar lessons, drum lessons, karate classes, and Loud Chemistry gigs.

“I come from a big family and if I could tell you anything about myself, it’s that I am a very family-oriented person,” says Raridon. “A lot of people are surprised to hear that about me because I function a lot in the adult world, and people have different ideas about people like me. But really, I’m just a good old-fashioned, conservative girl.”

“My son is following in his mother’s footsteps, he loves to be busy, just like I do,” says Raridon as she strokes her son’s hair. “He’s got his dad’s amazing good looks and he’s got my absolute zest for life and outgoing personality.”

The Maddox household contains a furry edition as well, consisting of two cats and three dogs, all of which are rescued animals. “We are animal people,” said Raridon as she explained how the family volunteers at the Williamson County Humane Society.

“I think if I had to have a word to describe my life, it would be serendipity,” says Raridon, sitting at her dining table, which she had just embellished with Easter decorations. “I’ve been one of those fortunate people who when opportunity has come knocking, I have been able to grab the bull by the horns. That’s what happened with my business, teaching career, wildlife rehabilitation, the Burlesque Festival, and that’s kind of what happened with my dancing.”