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Talk about "The Second Coming", Fergie is back and certainly living the life. In this post Connie Wilson, our guest writer, walks through the life of a sensational entertainer who has seemingly done it all.

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On May 7^th, 2008, Stacey Ann Ferguson (AKA “Fergie”) was serenading George Clooney on the occasion of his 47^th birthday. Both Fergie and John Mayer performed at a private party held at Bungalow 8 after a Post-Met Costume gala. On April 15^th, 2008, Fergie appeared in Nelly’s new video, in anticipation of their new album entitled “Brass Knuckles” that the two are collaborating on and will release on June 24^th, 2008. Fergie appeared on “American Idol’s “ Idol Gives Back program, performing with Ann Wilson of “Heart.” Also quite recently, the news of Fergie’s engagement to heartthrob Josh Duhamel of the television show “Las Vegas” was announced; the two have bought a house together.

With hits like “London Bridge,” “Fergalicious” (which rose to #2 on “Billboard’s Hot 100”), “Glamorous” (as high as #4 on the United World Chart), “Big Girls Don’t Cry”---which broke big as #2 on the United World Chart, “Clumsy,” and “Finally,” Fergie is riding high. She’ll also be contributing the theme song to the soon-to-be-released long-awaited movie version of “Sex & the City,” a song which Director Michael Patrick King described this way, “It’s an entirely new song with lyrics, but it has the ‘Sex & the City’ theme as the DNA---on steroids.”

It wasn’t steroids that brought Fergie down. It was hard drugs, most notably crystal meth. She was brought up in a strict Roman Catholic home in Hacienda Heights, California and, after graduating from Glen A. Wilson High School, she scored an agent who got her voice-over work as Sally Brown and Lucy in two Peanuts cartoon movies: “It’s Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown” (1984) and “Snoopy’s Getting Married, Charlie Brown” (1985). She also appeared on television’s “Kids Incorporated”, was co-host of “The Great Pretenders” on televison, and was a member of a trio of female singers known as “Wild Orchid,” a group composed of Fergie, Stefanie Redel and Renee Sandstrom.

“Wild Orchid” made two albums, but the third album was not a hit, and it wasn’t until Fergie was invited to replace Kim Hill in the Black Eyed Peas by Interscope Chairman Jimmy Iovene that things really took off for her, in a partnership with that group and Will i. Am.

Fergie played lounge singer Gloria in the IMAX version of Wolfgang Peterson’s remake of “The Poseidon Adventure” and was slated to reprise Adrienne Barbeau’s role as Stevie Wayne in John Carpenter’s “The Fog” in March of 2005. She had also been announced as being cast in a role as an undercover cop on “The Sopranos,” a cop who worked as a stripper in Tony’s Bada Bing nightclub, but the last two projects didn’t come to fruition.

Some of the reasons for that might have to do with Fergie’s now well-known drug problems, which she represented to her girl group (“Wild Orchid”) as bulimia to explain her dramatic weight loss. She told Elena Gorgan (“Softpedia, July 18, 2006), “I put up a whole front. I even took them to Overeaters Anonymous with me. I’ve never been a bulimic in my life, but when you’re a drug addict, you lie.”

Complications continued when the young singer rebelled against her childhood strict upbringing in the home of Patrick and Terri Jackson Ferguson, a family of mixed Irish, Scottish and Mexican heritage. “It was my way of getting away from everything. I was totally wrapped up in it and I was going crazy.” She says drugs left her an emotional, physical and financial wreck and that she was on unemployment when she joined the Black Eyed Peas. Fergie could have been the poster girl for “Girls Gone Wild” or rehab at that point.

“When I was going through my out-of-control phase, I could have got into very dangerous situations.” (Mirror.co.UK, 2/04/07). She has been quoted as saying of herself at age 18, “I have had lesbian relationships in the past. I won’t say how many men I have had sex with, but I am a very sexual person.” Maxim magazine agreed, naming her Number Ten on its list of the Hot 100 Women of 2007 and, in 2006, naming her Number 36.

Fergie’s addiction to drugs led her to tell “Time” magazine, “It was the hardest boyfriend I ever had to break up with. It’s the drug that’s addicting. But it’s why you start doing it in the first place that’s interesting. A lot of it was being a child actor. I learned how to suppress feelings.”

Said the pop star in “US” magazine (9/18/06, ‘Fergie Discusses Kicking Meth, Thinking Outside the Bun’), “In my experience, ecstasy led to crystal methamphetamine and I just think that people don’t know how addictive that drug is. It’s so cunning, because it’s such a fun drug at first. You lose weight and look great for a while, but I don’t care if it takes six months or five years. It will creep up on you. Don’t be fooled and think you’re special.”

Fergie even tells a harrowing story of a drug deal gone bad this way: “I had a gun put to my head during a drug deal that went wrong. Luckily, I got out of it.” (Mirror.co.UK, 2.04/07).

Then there was the episode when, as Fergie told it to Scotland’s Daily Record (December 7, 2005) “I had a few drinks before we went onstage and I didn’t think to go to the bathroom before we went onstage. We were jumping around and it was all very rock and roll and my bladder just started….you know.”

Embarrassing as that may have been, her song “Big Girls Don’t Cry” notes, “It’s time to be a big girl, now.” Fergie has matured, kicked drugs, and grown into her fame. She’s moving forward with the Nelly project, getting married, and, as her 6’ 3” fiancée, Josh Duhamel told Stephen M. Silverman in a June 19, 2007 People magazine article (“Josh Duhamel Reveals His Pick-Up Line on Fergie,”) describing how he spoke to his 5’4” future wife [after she had made a guest appearance on “Las Vegas” on November 1st, 2004, in an episode entitled “Montecito Lancers,”]: “She’s (Fergie’s) a real total star. I’m more subdued than that. I’d rather sneak up on people. But that’s what makes us work. We have similar fundamental values. We both grew in similar families. She’s just got a great soul.”

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This post guest-blogged by Connie Wilson...