Cher is going through some family stuff right now. The Johns and I were driving up to a family reunion in northern New Mexico last week when I saw the news on my phone, that Elijah was in some more drug trouble. I remember thinking to myself days later, this is going to push back an already-rushed Memoir 2 schedule and we’re going to need to be okay with that.

Sure enough, Cher Universe reported last weekend that the memoir is being pushed back to May 19, 2026. Not the least of our problems right now. Anyway, let’s not dwell about sad Cher-family things.

Dark Lady, The Unlikely Musical

Happily I recently created a Broadway page on Cher Scholar. Last week, Playbill announced a new Cher musical called Dark Lady, this one aiming for an Off-Broadway run.

The Cher Show musical (on tour now) tells the biography of Cher through her hits catalogue (which was a challenge since very few of her songs are autobiographical) and I contend was worthy for its direct message to fans and women about working through fear and Cher’s candor about how difficult parts of her life were.

But this is a new fictional musical possibly using many of the same songs.

There was supposedly two private, by-invitation-only, industry presentations held on 20 June in NYC with a presentation cast, directed and choreographed by Sara Edwards. They story was written by Mike Sheedy.

Ok let’s just stop here for a minute to talk about Mike Sheedy because there is a story here. (Today has been nothing if not adventures in show-biz research on search engines.) My new Brave search engine found nothing on this man. Zippo. Google (secondary searches only) pulled up this amazing story on him from 2015. He’s a family practice doctor from Chatham, Illinois, who wrote this musical and has been trying to get it produced  since 2008! It’s based on something he wrote for his daughters to perform at a party! “I discovered a story line in her songs,” he says. “I used 23 Cher songs to create a musical called ‘Dark Lady.'”

What a smooth Dad move! I love this guy! The more I read about this the more I’m 100% in favor of it!!

According the Playbill story, the musical follows a young gypsy on a wagon train who has a fortune-teller mother, a preacher father and two friends of various hair colors. “It seems safe to assume the score will include Cher’s 1971 hit, “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves.” (Playbill writer Logan Culwell-Block quipping there.)

Some Broadway aficionados are already sniping that The Cher Show didn’t do well enough to warrant another Cher jukebox musical. “Broadway61004” posted on Broadwayworld.com on 20 June at 10:41am: “I was about to say ‘why does someone think another Cher jukebox musical is needed when the first one did so poorly’ and then I saw Ken Davenport and it all made sense.”

There’s a snipe in there about this man’s production record so I researched him this morning, too. Davenport produced Barry Manilow’s ill-fated but bravely produced (considering the subject) Harmony musical most recently. He also did Cyndy Lauper’s Kinky Boots which won Tony Awards for Best Musical and Best Original Score and Davenport has a list of plenty of other awards and Broadway successes so…why the shade?

No news on when the show will open. Maybe it depends on how well the presentations went.

Meanwhile, Cher World has also been hinting about some major Cher news on July 8.

Has anyone started to notice the trend in social media Cher accounts: Cher World, Cher Universe, The Cher Planet….we now just need a Cher Galaxy, a Cherlandia, the State of Cher, and a No Cher Country for Old Gay Men. (Ok, I’ll stop.)

But here are some other things to keep us preoccupied for a little while:

Fan Theory

I’ve been gathering a decade’s worth of notes on pop-culture theory for a Cher book. They’re organized by subject type and I picked fan theory to start with so I could turn over all my books to the Intro to Anthro podcast team who are working on a future show on fandom. (I have now moved on to film theory.)

But fan theory is very fascinating: how do people become fans of things, what are the kinds of fans? We all have grandiose ideas around taste but it’s really all about peer groups and identity building.

I made some buckets for myself to categorize how fan-y people can get (with my own examples):

  1. Things you happen to come across and think are great (Dolly Parton, Bryan Cranston performances). You make no effort to find more of their stuff but appreciate each thing you come across and tend to proselyte about it.
  2. Things you like enough to consume “the best of” that thing (Patti Labelle, Ben Folds). You are no completist but you know a lot more than someone who isn’t a fan.
  3. Things you try to be a completist about (Haruki Murakami novels, Vincent Price). You’ll complete the series or all of the albums, movies or books in an oeuvre but then never feel compelled to do that ever again. Things for which you can say, “I once got really into The Muppets.”
  4. Things you are a completist about and consume over and over (The Mary Tyler More Show, Cher).

Not all of these things are about identity building. Some are just escapist fun. For example, I like to read haunted house novels but I’m not a part of any horror-loving community. And what does contribute to identity-building sometimes has nothing to do with its intensity level. For example, I can trade in on my Bryan Cranston fandom (as in “I saw Bryan Cranston perform in Network on Broadway”) in ways to offset how people may harshly judge my intense Cher fandom. My Cranston fandom is not intense, but it’s useful you see?

It’s all about this thing called “social capital.”

Social Capital

Fans have this annoying tendency to use their knowledge about something in order to gain social standing, especially in the fan universe of that thing. Poets are the absolute worst about this, by the way. Worst of the worst. But it’s flagrant in pop-culture fandom, too. One fan-theory scholar used the fan universe of the TV show Quantum Leap as an example. The people who knew the most about the show gained social capital in their fan forum; they gained social standing among the other fans.

I have become highly aware of my social capital as Cher Scholar. I am reminded of this whenever I am contacted to speak as Cher Scholar or when I meet other fans who have visited my site and tell me they are fans of my fanning. I am also aware of my social capital in other fan environments.

For example, during Covid my day-job company started social forums on all sorts of subjects from cooking to pets to music. In each forum I found myself having to negotiate my social capital around that subject. You were acknowledged or ignored based on the dynamics of each group. I had no cooking experience but that group found me funny. I had some music knowledge but that group was overrun by male heavy metal snobs who only wanted to talk to each other. The book group dynamics went nowhere because everyone was conversationally challenged.

If you’ve been to any fan forum, Facebook page or attended a fan convention, there is invariably that guy (and many times a girl) who will be angling for social positioning as the top dog, maneuvering to get to the top of that particular heap ‘o fans based on their longevity in the group or the lording of arcane knowledge or just from a place of general snootiness.

I refuse to trade in on my own social capital or deal with anybody else’s. It’s a waste of everybody’s time. I tend to gravitate to the nicer fans (often the goofballs in the group). They are often the only ones I will engage with. It’s also why I put the term ‘Cher scholar’ before the names of all other fans I talk about on my blog. Because truly we’re all experts in different ways.

Academic discussion itself is a distancing tactic (I know; I do it). That’s also why I gravitate to the fans who squee (show exuberant emotion about the thing) for the opposite reason. It’s intentional lack of distancing, it’s demoted social capital. Besides, I have often found that it’s the popular kids who are always the least interesting. There’s not an adjective “extraordinary” for nothing.

Here’s another favorite example: during one of the old Cher Conventions in Woodland Hills, California, years ago a talk show crew showed up (I think it was Megan Mullally’s short-lived show) and they interviewed the organizers and hosted a trivia contest for the fans. Now I ran the trivia game for prior conventions so I had social capital in this area. But I did not play for various reasons including I hate all cameras and competitions. But a longtime Cher fan named Phil did play and I watched him answer questions from the sidelines. He missed only one question: “what does Cher consider her best feature?” He guessed her cheekbones. The show’s answer was her eyes. Fair enough. He came straight over to me afterwards to ask me what I would have said. I said I would have guessed the very same thing, her cheekbones!

The fact is we are on the same team, all of us Cher fans. We weren’t in competition with each other. And I think Cher fans in general are like this because they’re truly outsiders in so many ways, sometimes very difficult and dangerous ways. We need to stick together. There are some Cher fans who try to cash in on their social capital, maybe as writers of liner notes, authors or talking heads. But it’s not very extreme like it is for fans of other people.

The fact is, social capital really buys you nothing valuable (at least as a writer and at least outside of that fan bubble).

This all got me to thinking recently of the ex-wife of a friend of mine who trades in on the embarrassingly intimate secrets of her social group for her projects. She does this to position herself as a guru in order to try to gain social capital. And it doesn’t work very well for her, by the way, because you need knowledge, expertise (and a bit of charimsa) to be convincing as a guru. But this all seems to be a big part of her identity building. And that got me to thinking about Cher as a guru. Cher has published books and tapes on exercise and eating well and has traded in on her fame as a commercial pitchwoman.

But in almost every case she has had a real fitness, hair or beauty guru alongside her. She positions herself as a student, not a guru. The book Forever Fit had Robert Hass. Her exercise videos had professional dancers and trainers running the routines (Keli Roberts and Doriana Sanchez). Her skincare line had  makeup artist Leonard Engelman. Cher never claimed expertise over something she hadn’t earned. Which is kind of unusual in the celebrity product world. And I think in some ways, her willingness to be perceived as a student and not as the top-dog has an affect on her fans.

Why do we position ourselves as gurus and superfans? I don’t know. I think it’s part of our influencer obsession. Nobody wants to be a real teacher (the pay is for shit) but everyone has a how-to or educational video on YouTube. And it’s not that they’re not often very helpful, both the YouTube gurus and the superfans. Their lifehacks and CD recommendations are often very valuable. It’s just the spirit in which their advice is offered which can be completely useless.

Being Ahead of the Curve

And then there are the fans who are ahead of a curve. This has it’s own social capital. Mr. Cher Scholar calls it being a “cool finder.” People take a certain pride in finding things before everyone else does, before things attain mass popularity or critical acclaim. To like something before it “hits big” has a special cachet. It says something about your taste and ahead-of-it-ness. You’re not a follower. You’re a leader. What older Cher fan hasn’t felt it when a whole new generation of Cher fans gets onboarded or whenever institutions and critics come around to Cher?

Many fans will abandon their subject when this happens. And they have both true and false rationalizations at the ready for when they do this. Usually they will say the artist or thing got commodified and has started pandering to the bigger audience. But the truth is that the very fact of being ahead-of-it was where their identities were building, not in liking the thing itself.  They can say “it was better before x. y and z” all they want.

I call this the “As Good As It Gets” phenomenon. At the end of that movie, Melvin Udall gives this big, beautiful speech:

“I might be the only person on the face of the earth that knows you’re the greatest woman on earth. I might be the only one who appreciates how amazing you are in every single thing that you do, and how you are with Spencer, “Spence,” and in every single thought that you have, and how you say what you mean, and how you almost always mean something that’s all about being straight and good. I think most people miss that about you, and I watch them, wondering how they can watch you bring their food and clear their tables and never get that they just met the greatest woman alive. And the fact that I get it makes me feel good… about me.”

The last line is the most important: “and the fact that I get it makes me feel good…about me.”

Some fans abandon their subjects, yes, but since we are Cher fans and she’s been in and out of favor more times than practically any other artist, we’d get motion sickness trying to stay ahead of it. Plus personally I just love to be right. Like I really like it. And I can like it a long time.

It’s actually one thing to see somebody doing something great before others do. You also have to able to articulate what you see. Especially if it’s something non-obvious. Or sometimes you like an obvious artist for non-obvious reasons (Barry Manilow). And then you have to gain some kind of appearance of objectivity. This is important. I’ve worked over the years at trying to sound objective about Cher. There’s the academic distancing and the claims that I don’t consider Cher a role model or an icon, which is mostly true but not entirely true. I don’t like everything and don’t feel compelled to say I do.

The point is you can see the magic but you need to be able to articulate it, that something deeper about it. And you need to be able to make an argument.

Deep Thoughts

Deep thoughts can get you social capital after a time and can change how a subject is perceived. And I’m not the only one who’s been doing this for Cher, by the way. This whole thing is just basically fans talking about you in a deeper way than most fans tend to talk about you. Often it takes lots of thinking about pop culture and a few mad creative writing skillz and maybe a Lit. degree or some such thing where you had to learn to write papers explicating a cultural object and make an argument about it. (Room 237 is a great documentary about this practice run amuck).

The average fan is not suited-up for this. Nor should they have to be. Rob Sheffield’s deep thoughts about Taylor Swift in his book Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop and Wayne Koestenbaum’s Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon are the best examples I can think of that are professional fan explications.

For Cher in the 1960s, 70s and 80s and 90s, nobody thought enough about what she was doing. Nobody put up an apparatus up to mull it over, gave it an area in which to ponder, a place to post their findings.

And for Cher I think all our work has helped a lot (as did the passage of time and Cher’s longevity) to raise her credibility profile. It was mostly Gen X fans who grew up with post-modernism and the willingness to talk about pop culture with the same consideration as high art. We were young students who understood pop art as a matter of fact. Highbrow was already considering lowbrow subjects and lowbrow subjects were already aiming higher and it’s all become swirled around together.

I’ve even come to think that good writing about an artist is more important than any accolade if only because accolades are not really all that specific. They never explain exactly why something is good or better.

Mr. Cher Scholar sometimes mentions that my Cher blog is about pop culture broadly and sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s also about Cher. And sometimes when I’m writing about Cher, I’m not really writing about Cher or pop culture at all. Sometimes I’m sending out subversive messages about myself. Or about you.