Hey now, the Official Cher Fan Club site is up again! I’m excited. For a minute. Then I find out the Join feature is still disconnected. “Check back soon.” Oh, you can count on it. So my wait to join this Cher fan movement continues. And I continue to feel like an outsider to their particular shenanigans.
As I’m surfing through their website, I’m also watching reruns of the 70s talk show classic, The Dick Cavett Show (there are no fan sites of Dick Cavett–don’t think I didn’t try). Cavett Show reruns are on my roommate’s tivo. This one is Katharine Hepburn. For about five years I’ve been working on a long-form Hepburn poem based mostly on Barbara Leamings biography of her family history, "Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist" by Andrew Britton (read my review), "The Making of The African Queen" by Hepburn herself and "Tracy and Hepburn" by Garson Kanin (Kanin and Ruth Gordon and Hepburn and Tracy were apparently a friendly foursome). Anyway, that mess of verse is now sitting unfinished in a box. Meanwhile, I’m watching this show as I blog, thinking she sure is a Chatty Cathy. But this is actually an historical TV moment, the Cavett episode where she throws down one of my favorite Hepburn quotes. I get vaklempt every time I hear it excerpted on a Hepburn documentary:
Fear is what you and I suffer from trying to be fascinating; which is asinine position to be in, you know, really. Here I am and aren’t I great department and it’s embarrassing; and you’re never sure that you can do it. If you have been taught basic freedom from fear and a basic belief in what 
you’re doing that is sufficient to carry you when everyone and his uncle thinks you’re wrong; and you still think, God damn it, I don’t think I’m wrong. I think I’m right and I’m gonna do it.
Cavett then quotes someone who stated Hepburn had the best cheekbones this side of Dover. This side of Dover: that must be an old 70s turn of phrase. Hepburn does have great cheekbones. But Cher’s are better. Well, they were better when Cher carried more of a gaunt look. I hope that’s not an effect of Botox, loss of cheeckbone definition. Because that’s a high price to pay for a lack of wrinkles. I’d go for the cheekbones any day and twice on Sunday. But then I’m a true blue for people with beautiful cheekbones. My short list: Cher, John Waite, Katharine Hepburn. All the gals in Witches of Eastwick have good cheekbones.
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