IRVINE, California from www.ocregister.com – The single mother sat down on her couch, taking a rare break.
She showed off her child’s finger paintings.
“Isn’t she quite talented?” Zorena Dombrowski said of the colorful creations of 3-year-old Ashley, who was playing in the park with her nanny – another pristine morning in suburbia.
Dombrowski, her house filled with Disney toys, kiddie furniture and a 100-pound German shepherd named Oskar, reached for a small photo album.
The floral cover sharply contrasted with the graphic pictures inside.
“These were taken by the director on the set,” Dombrowski said of the Polaroids from the early 1990s, when she was famously known as Sandra Scream — one of the hottest names in the porn biz.
Now, she simply goes by Zorena.
“Yeah,” she said, laughing, “that’s my real first name.”
Dressed in a pink shirt buttoned to the top and a long pink-and-purple skirt, Zorena flipped through the photos – all big hair and 42 DD chest.
“There’s no way I ever wanted to be famous – ever,” said Zorena, who now is a professional energy healer and spiritual counselor.
“God tricked me.”
Zorena, 42, isn’t exactly thrilled to be publicly airing her pornographic past.
She has quietly been raising Ashley — her daughter from a third marriage — and focusing on healing others, after years in the sex-industry spotlight.
Rather than trying to hide her controversial past, however, Zorena embraces it – and can’t entirely escape it.
She occasionally will get looks in the grocery store and other public places.
“Where have I seen you before?” she’ll sometimes get asked.
Operators of adult-oriented Web sites sometimes hit her up with offers to do high-paying live cam shows. Strip clubs in Vegas seek her services. So far, she’s not biting.
Being a porn star, Zorena says, helped her develop into a practitioner and instructor of pranic healing, a no-touch therapy that direct a person’s life force or vital energy on the affected part of the body.
“Porno was very empowering to me,” says Zorena, who grew up in celebrity-soaked Malibu to strict Jehovah’s Witness parents until she broke away from what she calls a “fanatical Christian cult” at age 19.
She lived job to job, struggling to make ends meet, until she became an adult-film actress.
“It got me over a lot of fear and helped build confidence – you either learn to swim well in that business, or you sink.
“The adult-film business made me a more compassionate, more tolerant person. I learned how to love people – no matter how freaky they were.”
Zorena now counsels clients over the phone at $200 an hour on dream interpretation, “karmic problems,” spiritual pain and the like – results guaranteed, or your money back.
Six months.
That’s how long Zorena acted in the adult-film business, where she made about 50 movies (and 35 magazine covers) with titles like “Eyewitness Nudes,” “Maiden Heaven” and “Double the Pleasure.”
As a porn star, she insisted on having her then-boyfriend [ed. note: the late Woody Long] as her onscreen male partner — and mostly getting her way. As a former beautician, she was obsessed about hygiene at the dawn of the AIDS era.
Because of her insistence on having one male partner and her religious upbringing, Zorena was known in the industry as “The Virgin Mary of Porn.”
As she writes in her recent online book “Love Child,” the roots of her adult-film career stem from a repressive childhood — first in Malibu and, between the ages of 7 and 11, in Newport Beach.
Her parents drank a lot and fought, and required her and her sister to study the Bible throughout the day — every day. They had a nasty divorce when she was young.
Zorena was ordained as a minister in the Jehovah’s Witness faith at age 16.
Her parents and church would not allow her to go to college. At 18, she married a fellow Jehovah’s Witness introduced to her by her parents. She left the church, and her husband, a year later.
“It was as if God switched an OFF button in my brain,” she writes.
Zorena had jobs in retail and got a license in cosmetology when a friend told her he could make her a porn star.
Needing the money, Zorena started modeling. She then did strip shows and progressed to adult films.
“The Italians have a saying,” Zorena says. “‘Everyone’s gotta eat.'”
Sandra Scream became an instant fan favorite for her long blonde hair and California good looks.
Her face and body soon were splashed across the covers of girlie mags like High Society, Hustler and Club.
An actor’s indiscretion helped rocket Sandra Scream’s fame into the stratosphere.
In July 1991, Paul Reubens, of “Pee-wee Herman” fame, was arrested for exposing himself inside a theater showing a porno flick: “Nurse Nancy,” starring Sandra Scream.
The arrest became a major news story and Zorena’s on-screen alter ego became part of the hype.
When she left porn, she enjoyed a lucrative career as an exotic dancer.
For eight years, she toured the country as a headliner at strip clubs, doing about 5,000 shows and earning as much as $20,000 a month.
Now, Zorena is no longer focused on exposing herself, but on helping people tap into what’s inside themselves.
A young woman calls her for guidance.
In a quiet, soothing voice, Zorena — who describes herself as clairvoyant — tells the 17-year-old that there’s been a curse in her family that has created bad luck.
Zorena also counsels her on an on-again, off-again romance.
“You deserve love,” says Zorena, who has about 50 clients.
She doesn’t quite understand why most people write off porn stars as freaks.
“To me, the typical consumer of porn makes the performers, by comparison, look tame,” she said.
Sure, the industry also attracts people wracked with pain-— the type of pain Zorena now is committed to healing.
“I think the biggest problem with this planet has to do with spirituality and sexuality,” she said. “If those two things are not in balance, then there are big problems — like war, greed and plagues.
“I think I’ve experienced more of the world by having been in the (porn) industry. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have become so compassionate — or understanding.”