North Babylon's Tara Colucci tries to 'Survive the Raft' in grueling new reality competition

Most little kids write letters to Santa Claus. North Babylon mom Tara Colucci’s kid wrote to “The Presidential Elections” to express his political preference.

“My younger son was like 8 or 9, and during the 2020 election he wrote on a piece of paper that he wanted me to mail, 'I know I'm not 18, but I still vote Trump 2020.' And I was, like, ‘Oh, man, kid,' y’know?” says Colucci, 37, herself a Donald Trump supporter, with a chuckle. Amused, she posted a photo of the note online. “And after that I started getting messages. … That's when they reached out.”

“They” were casting people for Discovery’s “Survive the Raft,” premiering Sunday at 9:01 p.m. The new reality show places nine Americans of diverse races, geographic areas and religious and political beliefs on a 60-foot-by-40-foot barge on the Pacific Ocean near the Pearl Islands off Panama, to see if the participants will behave cooperatively or competitively in the face of physical, mental and monetary challenges. Newcomers join when some get eliminated.

Former Green Beret and NFL pro Nate Boyer hosts the show, which re-creates anthropologist Santiago Genovés’ controversial 1973 study of whether internationally diverse people would work together to survive at sea. The 2019 documentary “The Raft” shows things did not go well.

Colucci, born in Queens and raised in the Garden City Park/New Hyde Park area, left last Aug. 5 and shot into September, hoping to “prove to myself what I am capable of!” she wrote on Facebook. “ … Of course my boys[’] futures are playing a role as well and both my boys agreed to my choice,” she wrote of Brody, now 11, and Nicolas, now 14, her children with ex-husband Philip Colucci. “I have to be the best me in order to be the best mom and this day is the start of me finding me and proving to myself who and what I am!”

One thing she is, is a survivor. “I was 12 when my mom was murdered. She had a drug problem,” Tara Colucci, the eldest of four children, says of Carolyn Ann Sonnenberg. “And somebody … shot her in the head” in July 1998. Colucci was living with her maternal grandmother on Long Island when news reports said Sonnenberg and a boyfriend, living in Anderson, South Carolina, died in an apparent murder-suicide after a loud argument.

Colucci’s life had been complicated from the start. “My biological dad is Michael Nuzzi,” whose father had founded Mineola’s Nuzzi Fuel, no longer in the family. “He wasn't on my birth certificate,” which lists Robert Amos because “my mom got pregnant when she was very young and … she wound up marrying somebody else.”

The couple divorced “when I was only 2 or 3. And then I lived with my mom until I was 5, and then with my [maternal] nana … who had taken me from my mom because of the drug problems. … By the time I was 15, I had moved in with my biological dad and my [paternal] grandmother” after disruptive, acting-out issues.

Then in 2014, 5-year-old Nicolas was diagnosed with liver cancer less than two weeks before a cruise; not having purchased travel insurance, the family lost $4,000 that Norwegian Cruise Line would not refund. (After the issue became news, Celebrity Cruises stepped in and gave the family a cruise. Following chemotherapy, Nicolas has long been in remission.) And in 2020, the COVID pandemic caused the shuttering of a successful direct marketing and sales firm she had founded.

Now a stay-at-home single mom, Colucci says the show’s mental hardships were more challenging than the physical. But, “I think growing up on Long Island and being around so many different types of backgrounds, ethnicities and beliefs gave me an upper hand.” The raft’s diversity “wasn't so much of a culture shock for me.”