Things are a bit crazy-making this fall. When I’m overwhelmed with projects, I tend to want to make lists, in this case all the things percolating at Cher Scholar. Everything’s coming along…if only in baby steps.

The Autobiographies

Soon I’ll finish out the 1970s with the two memoirs (Sonny’s and Cher’s). Then I’d like to go back to the food bios found in Forever FitĀ andĀ Cooking for Cher. And then go back to the childhood, 1960s and 70s stories Cher gave us in The First Time. Rabbit Hole 1.

Food

I’ve been making a few more recipes from the Cher cookbooks:

Rabbit Hole 2. But I’m not going to make every recipe in the Cher cookbooks. I would like to finish out the pescatarian recipes in Cooking for Cher, like the Fiery Pepper Shrimp Fried Rice and the Shrimp Borracho recipes. In that cookbook, there’s also Georgia’s cornbread stuffing I’ll try this Thanksgiving. And I have one more spaghetti sauce recipe to try in Forever Fit.

Dolls

I don’t have much more to add to the Cher doll fashions breakdown (Rabbit Hole 3) except to say that it occurred to me this week that my fleet of Cher dolls have nicer clothes than I do.

Conceptualizing Cher

Rabbit Hole 4: Soon I’ll do a review of Anne Zaleski’s 2025 Cher book. I liked how she categorized Cher stuff. I’ll be organizing my own media studies notes for a long while for my own project. I’ve moved on from books about videos to fan theory to books on movies to camp and now I’m moving on to the books on pop-culture slumming (high vs. lowbrow) and then maybe I’ll organize the music or television stacks next. I like to do small category stacks first (low hanging fruit).

Along this vein, I’ve been watching Captain & Tennille variety shows on DVD, which is both illuminating (variety shows aren’t easy) and disturbing (that Daryl Dragon guy) and this has led to me purchasing Toni Tennille’s memoir from Thriftbooks to find out what was going on with that very un-Sonny & Cher-like musical couple.

And then Ben Stiller’s documentary on his parents Jerry Stiller and Ann Meara is coming out on AppleTV at the end of this month. This will be another fascinating look at the married showbiz couple.

If I had to put these three couples on a continuum concerning how best to navigate a backstage relationship within a married-couple showbiz act, it would be Captain & Tennille on one end and Stiller and Meara on the other, with Sonny & Cher somewhere in between.