For those of you who know me personally, you’ve already heard the news that my mother passed away at the beginning of the year after a long, depressing battle with COPD.

I had been waiting for the new year to write about Cher’s heavily-anticipated 20 December appearance on Saturday Night Live and now somehow those two things have converged.

The episode was a ratings boost for the SNL, whether you believe this was due to Ariana Grande hosting, musical guest Cher or the emotional departure of Bowen Yang, or a combination of all three. Arianna Grande did a great job. She was funny and mastered many different characters. I don’t watch the show very often, but overall it seemed like a good Christmas episode.

Cher only appeared in one extra skit, the Delta Lounge skit, and then Kenan Thomson did a spoof of “Believe” as a corrupt black Santa Claus.

I watched the show live at my brother’s house in Cleveland. My brother, sister-in-law and niece Eliza were there and one of her local friends came over to watch. It was very interesting to see the show with young women. My sister-in-law asked Eliza’s friend if she even knew who Cher was. My family is convinced Cher is a flash-in-the-pan and no statistics or living legend inductions will convince them otherwise.  Alternatively, they could be just trolling me. My family has done that in the past.

But my niece Eliza’s friend did in fact know who Cher was and was decidedly on team Cher because she thought Arianna Grande was too thin and a bad influence for young women because of it. We talked about this at length after the show and looked up pictures of Arianna Grande from years ago. My niece is a huge Arianna Grande fan going back to her early televisions shows so I could relate to what she must have been feeling, having to defend her fandom. This was what Cher fans were doing back in the mid-1970s.

A lot of discussion circled around Cher’s lip-syncing. I am usually pretty good at noting when a Cher song is too close to the album version (“DJ Play a Christmas Song” was an example of this) or when the song may have been re-recorded for the show but Cher makes mistakes in the sing-a-long (“Run Rudolph Run” matched this rubric). But my brother, an occasional live singer himself, found a new tell. He noted one time in the performance when Cher pulled the microphone away from her mouth and the vocal didn’t change to reflect this.

There was plenty of controversy about the lip-sync performances online, too. And what more can I say anyway about Cher and lip-synching or plastic surgery or autotune. Did she or didn’t she? The questions are full of schadenfreude.

I do not need to hear the opinions of other fans and non-fans about Cher controversies. For a lifetime, my own family has needled me with them. They have a particular way of asking about something with an agenda lurking in the shadows of their questions. Like over the years when the Kansas City Chiefs football team loses spectacularly. “How does John feel about the Chiefs losing?” As sports fans themselves, they don’t even need to ask the question. They just like to hear the grieving.

My ambivalence is fully on record (about football, lip-syncing, plastic surgery and autotune). I tend to like live singing, especially on a show that makes so much of its liveness. Even if the singing is not so great. But I won’t exactly rent my garments about all the American Bandstand or Solid Gold episodes of Cher lip-syncing.  Cher has sung live on hundreds of television shows in her lifetime and if she lip-syncs on every show from now until the end of her life, it won’t change the ratio all that much. But then again, the people who remember the days of Cher singing live on television are a dying cohort. And with A.I., the past is quickly becoming a fiction.

So…blah, blah, blah.

During my December visit to Cleveland, (a rush visit because my mother was suddenly declining), I learned a bit of the kids’ new slang: parasocial. For the young whipper-snappers this means a one-sided relationship with famous people who are not in any way socially related to you. I am very comforted by this new jargon because it reminds me of when my friend Christopher visited me when I lived near an Amish community in Pennsylvania. We were driving by some Amish playing volleyball and he said something like, “Imagine living your whole life not knowing who Janet Jackson is!” And I replied, “but instead, they know who their neighbors are.”

I get it, but then I’m Cher Scholar. So obviously I’m a conflicted pop-culture consumer.

So when I watched SNL again with my parents that Sunday afternoon, which was also the last moment of television I watched with my mother ever, I wasn’t surprised that she wanted to cover and recover the issue of Cher’s lip-syncing. My mother never did approve of my Cher obsession. And it’s not because she didn’t watch all of the The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour episodes because my parents faithfully did. She just wanted me to grow out of it. Whether this was because she resented my alternate-universe fantasy of glam-parents or because she was simply annoyed by the frivolity of a celebrity obsession, I do not know.

But when she got wind that Cher might not have sung “live” on Saturday Night Live, she kept asking me about it all afternoon.

Now this was also because she was failing. Mostly alert up to the end, the lack of oxygen and build-up of CO2 in her blood was causing her to forget some things and get confused. She might have just been trying to remember if I had said Cher did or didn’t sing live.

Or maybe she was needling me about it. Like if it was the last thing she did… she would remind me of Cher lip-syncing on Saturday Night Live.

My mother and I had our problems over the 57 years. We were very different people. And those differences often chafed. Even if we had been more similar, the mother-daughter relationship is a strange brew even in the best of relationships. But we had both come a long way over the last few years. My December visit with her was very emotional. We knew the end was coming. And for the last year or so,  whenever I said goodbye to her I would say, “I love you” and she would say, “I love you too…more than you know.”

And I would always be reminded that this was one of my favorite Cher songs. Similarly, after she died I came across an article about Moonstruck quoting Loretta’s recounting of her emotions after watching the opera La Bohème:

“That was so awful. Beautiful. Sad. She died.”

And the end was indeed awful, in all the ways.

My parents didn’t laugh at any of SNL skits or seem to register seeing the show (or Cher) at all. (And they watched SNL every week.) But then again they don’t seem to watch television anymore the way the rest of us do. They can never seem to consistently remember what they have just seen even a few minutes later. It’s like they’re in their own world of dreams while the television is on.

Two Saturdays later, my mother would be gone.

These last five years have been harrowing for the family, not least of all for my mother. We’ve been up and down on a neverending roller coaster since she contracted COVID back in November of 2019. She miraculously survived that and then things were looking up. Then things were not looking good again and it was a reeling see-saw month to month. We couldn’t seem to keep a direction in sight for longer than a few weeks, good or bad. It was an endless and laborious and heartbreaking switching back and forth. It wore us all down. It wore her down terribly. She was getting better. She was getting worse. There was hope. There was no hope. She was giving up. She was fighting on. Deciding how to be in that world was hard enough but somehow manageable. It was the constant switchbacks. Years of switchbacks.

 

No, I do not obsess over lip-syncing or plastic surgery or autotune. But what I have always obsessed about is the truth. Let us all acknowledge that which is true. Just be honest about it. Like Zack Bagans’ Haunted Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada. Just cop to your amazing, next-level haunted house and drop the whole museum thing. Just own whatever it is you are doing.

I get fatigued. Especially lately around so many who can’t seem to do that. I’ve also been run down by those who can’t seem to keep track of the things I’ve said. Because after this whole thing, I have no energy left to keep repeating myself. So when for the third time during watching Saturday Night Live when my mother asked me “Did Cher sing?” I responded with a combination of frustration, futility and (in hindsight) maybe even some unintentional kindness.

In the face of her suffocating death and confusion and fear and all the insurmountable loneliness to come and the sad state of world affairs today with all the lies and obfuscations (from even those who happen to love us so), what does it even matter what truth is anymore?

So when my mother asked me for the third time “Did Cher sing? I just said, “Yeah mom, she sang.”