Sometimes When I’m Down and All Alone

There’s so much to catch up on. It’s very daunting, all the words we need to think up for this year's Cherness. And I’m so, so very tired.

This is a white-hot Cher year for sure. And so much is worthy of scholarship: reviews, commentaries (all more positive than we’ve ever seen them: a good Rolling Stone review? A good Entertainment Weekly review? What alternate universe are we living in?). So much amazing stuff: personal essays about Cher that you find here and there on the internet, canonization in Mama Mia 2 (with Cher-tapping no less), a plethora of personal appearances and interviews, Broadway, Vegas, a new tour, a new album. It’ll probably takes us many years to process it all, like dutiful curators in the museums of Cher.

So wow. My year was just…wow. I’ve never experienced a year quite like it. Both awful and awe-ful in so many ways. Heartbreaking, a lot of it. I’m sitting in a new proverbial chair surrounded by an entirely different world than I started with back in January. Everything has suffered through the metamorphosis: activism (although I created three new voting ads this month for ArtBrawl), poetry (although I published my second book at the end of August), Cher blogging (although I’ve been hanging in there with about 75% of the product and appearances). The job changes have been daunting alone but there were also family illnesses, three family trips (one amazing Arizona trip tracing family history) and we were forced to move. I say 'forced' but really we just realized our rental situation was untenable and it was time to stop living like transient drifters. Brave. New. World. Moving was not easy and the pressures all year happening at the same time made me literally crazy (not that far to go, quite frankly). To date, I’m slightly more damaged than I was. I’m not living in the same house. I’m not working the same job. My friends have changed. I’ve had to put my coping mechanisms to the test and sometimes I failed to live up to them. But I’m here. And I am grateful to friends, my parents, and Mr. Cher Scholar for continued support during the mess of it.

Every time in “Chiqutita” when Cher sings “your life’s a broken feather,” I start to tear up. Indeed, this year was a broken feather. And I’ve loved that song since I was a tween, but never could parse what that phrase way saying: “your loves a broken tether?” I had no idea. “Your love’s a blown out candle”…also big news to me. But these things are so lovely to discover….finally.

Anyway, we need to get going and digesting all of this good media and “try once more like we did before” to blog about Cher stuff.