‘Idol’ New Year’s helps friend in need

  It’s one of the more modest New Year’s Eve offerings on the Strip, but it has quite the story behind it: One involving a singing Italian magician, a show that never opened and a storage-shed showdown that needed the police.
  It’s a little late for Christmas, but Cheryl Terhune Honore — known to friends and business associates alike as “Cheryl T” — is crossing her fingers for an “It’s A Wonderful Life” ending.
  There are plot similarities to the holiday classic. Cheryl T is on the hook for a hundred grand, and she says she’s on the verge of losing Las Vegas Connection, the entertainment and events production company she stared five years ago on a New Year’s resolution.
  The friends helping her in a pinch are three “American Idol” alumni: Dezmond Meeks (pictured), David Hernandez and Las Vegas’ own Mikalah Gordon (pictured).
  At this point we switch movie metaphors. They are not walking through the door with baskets of money, but doing the Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland “Let’s put on a show” thing in an attempt to save the day. Their New Year’s Eve “Greek Isles Idol” is basically a benefit. A benefit to save Cheryl T.
  “I’m stressing big time and it’s just really sad because I’ve done nothing wrong,” she says.
  It’s a long story that undoubtedly has two sides. But the other side is in Italy and it’s a holiday week, so here’s Cheryl T’s version in a nutshell.
  Basically, she says she worked as a liaison — using her business licenses and relationships with local vendors — to help Italian magician Antonio Casanova open a show at the Greek Isles last fall.
  In September, the singing, piano-playing magician performed a few shows that Cheryl T describes as “technical dress rehearsals” and a chance “to see what we had.”
  Turns out she didn’t see much.
  “When I told them they needed to make revisions in the show because it wasn’t at the level it needed to be for a Las Vegas stage, that’s when everything went to hell. They were offended.”
  More than that, they packed up and went back to Italy, disputing payments and launching an ongoing transcontinental legal battle.
  Cheryl T’s trump card is a storage unit full of illusions and props from the show. She’s been holding them as collateral. One night, “Their attorney and their U.S. tour manager showed up with these ninja-type security guards and a moving truck and cut my locks off the storage unit.”
  One of Cheryl T’s associates happened upon the scene and called the police, who intervened in the standoff and convinced the ninjas to return the goods.
  She since received an impassioned e-mail from Casanova himself, begging her to return them because he is no longer involved with the producers she is at odds with.
  He asks her to let him go back to work “with things I paid with real money in my life,” adding he has “a very difficult situation in normal life here” with two ailing parents.
  But Cheryl T says the magician “has just as much culpability in this because he’s the star.” Moreover, she’s a single mom, and “we had no Christmas because of these guys.”
  She signed contracts in her little company’s name with vendors such as Desert Entertainment and Clear Channel Outdoor, which put up the Antonio Casanova billboard you might have seen on Interstate 15.
  She’s hoping the New Year’s show can keep some creditors at bay. “A lot of people would skip out on their bills. That’s not me,” she says.
  She called Meeks, an “Idol” contestant from the fourth season whom she placed in Rat Pack tribute shows playing Sammy Davis Jr. “He lived with my family, as my son practically, for four months while he was working on his new music,” she says.
  Meeks, Hernandez and Las Vegas native contestant Gordon have taken to the Strip, passing out fliers for the show.
  “People believe in me,” Cheryl T says.
  Now she hopes a few of them will buy tickets.
  If you’re interested in the 10:30 p.m. show at the Greek Isles, call 267-8497 or check out mylasvegasconnection.com. Tickets start at $35.