a division of the Chersonian Institute

Category: Cher in Art & Literature (Page 1 of 7)

Kiss and Tells and Legacy Building

Cher: The Memoir, Part One Audiobook by Cher - 9780008355388 | Rakuten Kobo India“Why should one’s art then be an achievement? Why not more an adventure?”
— Poet Robert Duncan

We’re all waiting to see how much of Cher’s autobiography is a kiss and tell. She has said time and again that she never wanted to do that sort of memoir and was disappointed that Sonny did so with his.

But why should that keep one from telling their life story? Is that all a life is about? Sex and gossip? What about all the other struggles, joys and actualizations of the self?

Reading Ann Powers’ book on Joni Mitchell, it was interesting to see the point at which Joni Mitchell switched from making new music to legacy-building. This took the form of accepting tributes and re-releasing music in various ways.

Cher doesn’t seem interested at all in legacy building. I think she said as much in an interview last year. But this is part of what any memoir or compilation album or tribute speech or liner note is doing. Because after you’re gone, people will turn to these as points of reference. And sometimes this is because “the great work” itself becomes unavailable or gets misinterpreted as it loses the context of its time.

Legacy building happens differently for politicians and poets and painters and rock stars and actors. But there seems to me different ways you can go with legacy building as an artist:

  1. A relationship tell-all, (not the same as a sex tell-all), especially if you had a life-changing one, like Cher with Sonny. Surely there’s something in certain relationships that were inspiring or in some cases character building. Katharine Hepburn handles this with class and honesty when she talks about Spencer Tracy in her autobiography Me.
  2. Stories of the ridiculous and transcendent things that happened to you. And usually these things happen with people around you who you loved or hated and they experienced these same things too right along side you and so are part of your story. These events are also part of their stories.
  3. The change agents of your life. What or who sent you off at a 90 or 180-degree directions? What were the twists and turns in your before-then otherwise linear plot. These can be situations as often as people.
  4. Your creative problem-solving. All of us have had to do this. It reminds me of poet Frank O’Hara’s obsession with the  process of painting and poetry and determining the difference. How does your brain works to solve problems of your work? What tools did you use to work things out?

In any case, no one can top Sonny’s kiss-and-tell by a sexist rockstar (well, rockstar to some degree…in some minds…in my 7-year old mind). Sonny dropped the mic on this kind of tell-all, in my humble opinion.

He started a sexual relationship with underage girl (who became Cher) and then wrote a whole  book to complain about it. It makes Gregg Allman’s crass comments about his “hot” sex with Cher and other women (“they have two purposes: to make the bed and make it in the bed”) seem downright gentlemanly in comparison.

Cher’s Hawaiian Meatballs

So last night I attempted another Cher recipe, “Cher’s Hawaiian Meatballs.” I came across this recipe while I was in Cleveland researching images for the 16 Magazine responses.

Someone else had tried the recipe in 2019 and wrote about it on their blog Dinner is Served 1972.

When I got home, I tracked the actual cookbook down. It’s volume II of a charity cookbook for a Hawaiian drug and alcohol treatment center. (Click on the images below to read the full introduction.)

Cher’s recipe is the first one in the cookbook, under the section called Meats:

As you can imagine, the core ingredient in this recipe is pineapple.

Ingredients

2 1/2 lbs. ground beef (I used Beyond Meat instead, which complicated things considerably)
1/2 cup minced onion
1 egg
2 T. salt
1 cup bread crumps
1/2 t. ginger
1 1/2 T. shortening (I used vegetable shortening)
1/2 cup milk
2 1/2 T. cornstarch
2 cans pineapple (~13 oz. cans; good luck finding the right size cans and good luck finding canned fruit these days…but you need them because you gotta have the juice. So get it.)
3/4 cup brown sugar, packed
2 T. soy sauce
1/2 cup vinegar
1/2 cup chopped green pepper

Instructions

Combine meat, minced onion, egg, bread crumbs, salt, ginger and milk. Shape mixture into balls. Melt shortening in large skillet and cook meatballs until browned. Removed meatballs from skillet and place in oven on low heat to keep warm. Drain fat from skillet.

Mix cornstarch and brown sugar, stirring in the vinegar, soy sauce and reserved pineapple syrup until mixture is smooth. Pour into skillet and cook over a medium heat, stirring frequently until mixture becomes thick and is boiling. Continue to boil and stir for 1 minute. Adding meatballs, green pepper and pineapple bits, heat completely through.

Changes I made: I made the syrup first in a regular pan. It’s a nice thick, tasty syrup. I served the pineapple and bell pepper unheated on the dishes. I didn’t want the bell pepper and pineablle to get soggy in the syrup while we were waiting to eat the leftovers. Because I made the syrup first, I didn’t need to keep the meatballs warm in the oven. I’ve grown spoiled with Hello Fresh recipes and lose patience for recipes that don’t give you oven temperature, oven rack positions or time it takes cooking. Like I never made meatballs before. How long should it take for them to get done?

This was complicated by the fact that I was using fake meat and without Hello Fresh telling me it should take x to x amount of minutes, I never trust my own judgement. And then add to that, the fact that I didn’t pack the meatballs tight enough and the first batch fell apart in the skillet. I had to call in Mr. Cher Scholar to squish them tighter and help finish the next two batches.

My poorly packed meatballs:

Mr. Cher Scholar’s better meatballs:

I should have read the blogger Yinzerella’s piece before I started cooking because they wisely cut the recipe in half for two people. This recipe makes a lot of meatballs. I would estimate about two dozen meatballs, two dinners worth of meatballs unless you’re feeding a family or party of meatball eaters.

To accompany her meatballs, Yinzerella made fried rice. I made another bad decision to make mushroom risotto. I love risotto but it’s labor intensive. Not a good side for another labor intensive main dish.

But the risotto turned out great. I now have the hang of that.  Here’s the final plate on my one of the new washable placemats:

Everything was a hit. We would make this again. This is the first Cher recipe I can say that about. The fat-free ones weren’t as good as this fat-full recipe.

Yinzerella wonders what makes the recipe “American Style” as noted in the cookbook title, the fact that they were beef and not pork meatballs? I don’t know either.

The Cher and Andy Ennis Cooking for Cher book has other meatball recipes: Beef Meatballs in a Herbed Olive Marinara Sauce and Mexican Meatballs (Albondigas! A word I love to say) in Tomato-Orange Sauce.

The Cher and Robert Hass book Forever Fit also has Turkey Meatballs.

Yinzerella’s posts ends with, “Happy birthday, Cher! Shine on, you Bob Mackey-clad, ass-baring, half-breed, gypsy, dark lady diva. You are the Goddess of Pop and you are FABULOUS!”

For more Cher food stories:

Stealing Fandom

I was a little sister. There are five and seven years between me and my older brothers. I got into their shit all the time, too, because it turns out I was a little shit.

My mother, for a time a real estate agent, kept winning little portable TVs in the 1970s so each of us had a portable black and white TV in our rooms. I, the youngest, had the worst one, a square black box with a crazy wire-hanger antennae that only tuned into snow on every channel except one, PBS. It was like organic parental controls. So I only remember watching episodes of Lila’s Yoga on it. (And that show was oddly riveting.) Randy had a white portable and Andrew, the oldest, had a green portable which was the newest and best of the three.

After school in St. Louis, my brothers were always off playing sports and, as a latchkey kid, I had the house to myself. I’d fix a snack and head in to Andrew’s room to watch after-school TV. The big color TV in the den was too hard to operate. You needed pliers to turn the channels. Randy’s room was small and smelled like dirty socks. Andrew’s room not only had the best portable TV but a bookcase of books I often raided. I read all his Ralph Mouse books and he had some classics like Bedknobs and Broomsticks, He had the Louisa Mae Alcott books but those didn’t have any pictures inside and they looked old so I skipped those.

I also flipped through his somewhat large collection of Disney comic books. He would come home early some days, find me in there and then angrily kick me out. It must have been annoying as hell for him to come home and find his little sister in his private space. But I felt so bored in my own room until the day I finally inherited my grandmother’s old color TV and one of my brother’s old console stereos.

One summer after both Andrew and Randy were off at University of Illinois, I found a record stack they were sharing in Andrew’s room, records they had left behind that fall. And it’s a long story that involves anorexia, Prince-styled ruffled shirts, aerobics, mix tapes and a desperation to find songs with certain beats per minute, but I went through that stack of records one day. It was that desperation that overcome my normal aversion to their record stacks. We had a kind of rivalry or records, a gender contention between the testosterone, 70s and 80s rock albums of theirs and the 80s, queer-leaning pop records of mine. And although I had an appreciation for some of those 70s rock hits based on hearing them so many times down the hall, I was never looking to fine-tune that. It was a matter of principle.

But in any case, one day I did flip through and listened to some of them and I ended up pulling out three of Andrew’s records and “borrowing” them for a while.

For a long time I’ve tried to figure out what it was about those three records. I do this with Cher, too. I ask myself why I am a Cher fan? What was it that peaked my attention when I was four or five, combing through my parent’s record collection in Albuquerque and finding that first Sonny & Cher record? For Cher I have this whole “in utero” working-theory about being a baby inside a mother who had a deep smoker’s voice. I must find the contra altos comforting.

As I was assembling this blog story last week, I was also studying deep image poems in a book called Advanced Poetry by Kathryn Nuernberger and Maya Jewell Zeller. In the online notes for that chapter there was a link to an article by Federico García Lorca called “Theory and Play Of The Duende.” I read this same essay in grad school years ago and couldn’t make head nor tails of what this thing called duende was. And I remember that really irritated me at the time.  It seemed like hocus-pocus literary blather. Lorca’s essay never comes to a finite definition of what duende was or even a helpful rubric.

But I read that essay again last week, on the other side of whole life of joy, suffering and heartburn, and I think I can understand it better now. it’s a non-academic idea is the whole thing, and not a little bit mysterious. But the voice on those records had this rare quality of duende. I now think that’s what it might be. Duende made me pull those records out.

I recently reconnected with this same brother because I was in Boston for a weekend in early August. It had been 18 years since I had connected with my brother and probably over 20 since I have stayed with him and his stack of records. Immediately, I started flipping through his records there in his living room. Without permission, just like I was a tween. I told him what concert I had seen the night before and he said he used to have Babys albums (the first three) but they disappeared. He said he believed his University of Illinois frat house buddies had most likely taken them because they were popular albums at frat parties. I just “yeah, that’s too bad about that,” literally shocked because I’ve had kept these records since I was 15. Yes, I’ve had them 40 years!  And the thing is, I thought he knew it.

So when I got back home, I mailed those records back to him with an apology and the fifth Babys album as a modest interest payment. I mean, it’s not like I didn’t have a complete replacement set. My friend Christopher mailed me all the same records about seven years ago when he found them at a used record store.

Another thing I used to love to do in his bedroom was to read through his Mad Magazines magazines and books. I loved the Spy vs. Spy paperbacks. They were wordless and full of spy gadgets.

One day reading one of his Mad Magazines I came across a clip that featured Cher. It was, of course, a joke at her expense. But I was so thrilled to see a Cher mention in a Mad Magazine that I cut it out of his magazine and stuck it in my newly created Cher scrapbook.

Little sisters, am I right?

The clip was a joke about what an old Cher would look like at 50. They took a current 70s Cher photograph and played around with it, making her look gray and fat, which is interesting. Like she wouldn’t keep coloring over gray hair. Was that not a thing yet?  And they never assumed she would straighten her teeth. And in the predictive copy, they have her back with Sonny, which just goes to show that even the hipsters at Mad Magazine wanted to see Sonny and Cher get back together in their imaginations.

For context, Cher turned 50 in 1996. The It’s a Man’s World album had just come out. After 50, Cher would go on to record a worldwide #1 hit, spend years on the road with a record-breaking concert tour and continue on as an international entertainment icon. Not that we should be upset with Mad Magazine. Who could have predicted the future accurately except Cher herself?

Here is the pilfered clipping next to what Cher did look like at age 50s. At the top is what Cher looks like today at 78, still better than this gag photo.

By the way, I still haven’t told my brother about this other Cher thievery yet so…everybody, let’s keep this one quiet, okay?

Cher Scholarin Out in the World

So I noticed a few things at the end of last year while Cher Scholarin.

One was when I was coming home from a family reunion in Cleveland, (where my parents now live), and I was using Spotify logged in as Mr. Cher Scholar to locate Cher’s new Christmas album.  I noticed that the Cher Scholar playlists were coming up kind of high. (See left.)

But then I thought maybe that’s because Mr. Cher Scholar might have played those playlists once before and he was getting a personal shuffle. It’s hard to be scientifically objective in the universe of algorithms.

Results are definitely not consistent. You don’t even get the same major categories searching via phone app versus phone browser or desktop app.

I also visited the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this visit to Cleveland. Julie had gone earlier in the year and saw the electronic board of fan votes. At that time (May, 2023) Cher was in the #8 position and Britney Spears was the next female #10. She sent me a picture.

Cher was at #4 by the time I visited in November and shockingly Cher was not only the highest-ranking woman but still the only woman (solo or in a band) in the top twenty! Britney Spears was the next female listed at #21. Unbelievable.

But you can chalk all of this up to the kinds of people who visit the Hall of Fame (it’s not a cheap ticket). It’s also  not a pristine sample of everyone’s views by any means. It’s just a sample of the views of people who have the money and interest to travel to Cleveland and visit the RnR HoF.

I myself dutifully voted for Cher, as did Mr. Cher Scholar but I think that was probably just unspoken peer pressure. I don’t think he honestly cares a whit about Rock and Roll Hall of Fame artists.

Some of us have been theorizing the many reason’s Cher, as a record breaker, is not in the HoF: the silly perception of her from the varsity show, the lack of her cool factor in music, dislike of Sonny’s promotional (possible payola) background. My friend Christopher told me last weekend that HoF founder Jenn Wenner (recently removed from the HoF board due to some asinine comments he made about female and black artists), vowed never to let the band Foreigner in due to a personal grievance, which Christopher said was particularly egregious due to the impressive variety of their output.

But then on some basic level I just don’t understand Hall of Fames. We went through the Football Hall of Fame (also near Cleveland) on the same trip. To make sense of them, (and don’t get me started on museum theory and the idea of false scarcity: we’ve been there already), I spent the time counting both footballs (103) and guitars (167). There were no guitars at the Football HoF and no footballs at the Rock and Roll HoF. Go figure.

ASMR

So ASMR stands for autonomous sensory meridian response and it’s like the pleasure sensations you might get from certain tactile ambient soundtracks. I first heard about it from the trendy kids at the community college here in Albuquerque. It was a “thing” a few years ago to seek out ASMR videos which include things like people tapping their fingernails on hard surfaces, quietly whispering or silently unwrapping things, samples of vocal fry (okay, if that’s what you’re in to).

I was already primed to like this shit. Mr. Cher Scholar says one of my favorite movies, Into Great Silence, is just one long ASMR movie. I can also locate it near my love of really prominent movie foley (like from the 1970s-era) and my love of the sound of my feet walking over the plethora of varieties of New Mexico dirt paths.

So for a while now I’ve wanted to collect up all the Cher-related ASMR videos. Years ago these videos were very pleasant. But I’ve noticed a trend for ASMR practitioners to be too too repetitive (and almost too loud) these days. Full minutes of tapping the outside of a Cher shirt is just silly.

Also, unboxing videos have taken on a life of their own and some don’t even have any ASMR quality. People just like watching things be unboxed as it turns out.

Here’s a playlist for you of both ASMR and unboxing videos:

  1. Unboxing the Christmas album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z24VNjbzgFQ&t=46s
  2. Unboxing a Believe CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF2zUUo5IXo
  3. Unboxing the Believe CD box set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpz4UWLa1B4&t=231s
  4. Unboxing the It’s a Man’s World CD box set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNAN99o3mXk
  5. Unboxing It’s a Man’s World  vinyl box set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OneddA7ZTOg&t=124s
  6. Cher’s Eau de Couture perfume unboxing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPKGcxNgmNM (classic ASMR)
  7. Unboxing the Chersace shirt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F1uc7rz6lI&t=146s
  8. Some lucky fan got a box of Cher stuff and unboxed it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywlU2kdvPV4&t=2154s
  9. Unwrapping the I Paralyze CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgAoAStxayA
  10. Unwrapping the Living Proof CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sdONiBIIdA
  11. Cher samples of vocal fry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKJxbNynro8&t=261s
  12. This funny lady enthusiastically whisper-reads a Cher magazine while chewing gum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NZ4rLUvrGQ&t=238s

Cher in Literature

I’m always surprised when I find references to Cher in very fine literature. Last year I found two instances of this. Earlier in 2023 I started reading 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. I really enjoy Murakami and have been working my way through his books. 1Q84 is a tome at 1,157 pages of awesomeness. And the book kept coming back to references of Sonny & Cher and the song “The Beat Goes On.”

Here’s the novel summary from The Encyclopedia Britannica: “Set in Tokyo in an alternate version of the year 1984, Murakami’s reality-bending novel explores star-crossed lovers Aomame and Tengo’s involvement with a mysterious cult. References to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four abound explicitly and thematically.”

Page 499

Page 534

Page 544

Then right before Christmas I read a Donald Barthelme story from the book Forty Stories called ‘Porcupines at the University.” In the story the Dean of a college thinks an oncoming herd of porcupines are all about to enroll at his understaffed university. But a cowboy porcupine wrangler is simply driving them across the country in order to seek his own fame and fortune for his trail songs. He dreams about appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show or The Sonny & Cher Show (which were never concurrently showing but never mind.)

 

Cher in Literature

I came across another instance recently of Cher in a poem. This one is by Anita Endrezze.

La Morena and Her Beehive Hairdo

1965-1970

The Dark One sported a beehive hairdo
where she once hid her brother Alfonso.
His girlfriend had a husband who carried a switchblade
pretty as a butterfly in his back pocket.
Alfonso camped out in La Morena’s dusky hair
until the coast was clear, at least as far a San Pedro.
Then he vamoosed to Tucson
where he married a young hairdresser
from the Yaqui barrio.

Without any family responsibilities, La Morena felt light-headed.
She changed her name again. Old Lady. It was the sixties, man,
and she was everyone’s old lady. She really dug those long-haired vets
from Nam. She wore granny boots and long paisley dresses
and carried a small baggie of white horse
in her leather fringed purse. Everyone called her
Indian Princess and said Cher looked just like her.
She slept around, snorting coke up a straw
until she saw red stars galloping around her heart
and herds of tiny white horses dying in nights of Black Velvet.

I won’t ask her if she remembers. It was real
but it wasn’t true. She was living in someone else’s mandala
because it was on the top-ten chart. Somewhere
along the way she lost herself. It’s the Yaqui Way
of Knowledge by Carlos Coyote-Peyote.
When we found Jesus, we held out our palms
for coins, Bibles, good-looking Indian Boys.
She was my sister. Kneel down, little sister, she said.
And we did, down in front of altars of bees
and tubes of pale lipstick, crosses made of lovers’ bodies,
broken shoes, floods of moons, Janis Joplin, rowdy measures
of life. Those summers, slab dancing and picking up guys,
were the best times, she says, the best. When she was young
and I was just beginning my own story, my own howling
at the American moon.

2000

More Cher in Art and Literature

Cherart2There is so much Cher to catch up on. To paraphrase Jane in Witches of Eastwick, sometimes I just can't face it. 

Now that my projects have calmed down somewhat, I can get back into the swing of things and start blogging again. But if you ever need timely Cher news (and who doesn't?), you'd be well served to follow Cher Team Universe on Twitter. They get the scoop. I've never been a good scooper, sadly. 

Anyway, I'm feeling daunted by the sheer volume of Cher happenings right now. So I felt today it would be good to start with new developments in Cher in art and literature. Then we can move on to the juicy videos, documentaries, biopics, new music….all that stuff.

My friend Mikaela texted me a photo of the following beautiful, beautiful poem by Chen Chen from the 2017 book When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities:

Nature Poem
by Chen Chen

The birds insist on pecking the wooded dark. The wooded dark
pecks back. It is time to show the universe what you are capable of,
says my horoscope, increasingly insistent this month. 
But what I am capable of is staring

at the salt accident on the coffee table & thinking,
What sad salt. I admire my horoscope
for its conviction. I envy its consistency. Every day. Every day,
there is a future to be aggressively vaguer about.

Earlier today, outside the cabin, the sudden deer were a supreme
headache of beauty. Don’t they know I am trying to be alone
& at peace? In theory I am alone & really I am hidden,
which is a fine temporary substitute for peace, except I still

have email, which is how I receive my horoscope, & even here
in the wooded dark I receive yet another email mistaking me
for another Chen. I add this to a folder, which also includes
emails sent to my address but addressed to Chang,

Chin, Cheung. Once, in a Starbucks, the cashier
was convinced I was Chad. Once, in a Starbucks, the cashier
did not quite finish the n on my Chen, & when my tall mocha was ready,
they called out for Cher. I preferred this by far, but began to think

the problem was Starbucks. Why can’t you see me? Why can’t I stop
needing you to see me? For someone who looks like you
to look at me, even as the coffee accident
is happening to my second favorite shirt?

In my wooded dark, I try insisting on a supremely tall,
never-lonely someone. But every kind of someone needs
someone else to insist with. I need. If not the you
I have memorized & recited & mistaken

for the universe—another you.    

Buy the book.

Then later I was reading the thesis on Cher by Orquidea da Conceição and there's a poem referenced and included in the back appendices called "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Cher" by Margaret McCarthy from the 2015 book Notebooks From Mystery School." The poem is really about aging and the loss of relevance and I feel it misses the cubist focus on its  purported subject that is so interesting in Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." This poem is really 13 ways of looking about aging instead of contemplating Cher's struggle with same, but there are interesting ideas here about protection by transformation and the avoidance of looking old (the dogs yowling one way or another). Although this is part of Cher's craft, it's not all of her craft. Also good meditations on creating versus re-creating, an interesting switch from the blackbird to a raven, and the reference to Sisyphus (which always reminds me of Cher's 1972 song "Down, Down, Down").  Although I've never written very good Cher poems, this makes me want to do a 13 Ways Cher poem, too. Let's all do one.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Cher
by Margaret McCarthy

I

Why can't she just accept
it
the gravity
of the situation, the downward tug then spiral?

II

The raven black hair easy
to transform.
The smooth, hard sheen
of protection, her craft.

III

A miracle!
But now we know the nature of the cell is immortal.
She knew this first;
the raven heart told her.

IV

60 years can be called
miss. Is this
what 60 looks like?

V

I do not know which to prefer, creation or transformation; what I make in this world,
or the re-making of myself.

VI

Upkeep's ceaseless effort, Sisyphus
rolling back over
gray time,
over and over.

VII

The mirror's incisor lines, Imagination
flies forward and back

VIII

I know the pressure
of the rock bearing down, and I know that bird vision is involved in what I push.

IX

The dogs yowl
at imperfection;
the dogs yap
at perfection's attempt.
The sweet bird flies
above the noise of beasts.

X

Must the crone die?
Is the perpetual maiden the proper keeper of spirit's wisdom?

XI

The shadow of each equinox casts fear.
She thought the nature of cycles impossible.
Is balance possible?

XII

Is it culture's rock or time's?
The bird's eye sees time's river moving around rock and our desire
to transcend 
rock and river.

XIII

The bird's shaman heart understands
evening is going to cast its shadow all afternoon. Matter
has been brought or bought
to match spirit.
In my raven heart I know
she's right.

Buy the book.

The pop-art piece above is available from https://artandhue.com/shop/cher/.

Cher Copies at the Met Gala 2019, a Cher Meme and Vincent Price

Dresses

Looking at a recap in Cosmopolitan magazine, I noticed two dresses at the 2019 Met Gala that seemed very derivative of past Cher dresses. I don't know why but the Kim Kardashian dress reminded me of Cher's 1998 dress for the Academy Awards. Is it me? 

Kimk Kimk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And Jennifer Lopez wore Cher's "Take Me Home" dress (live version).

Jlo19met Jlo19met

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cher  Meme (I’m here)

Imhere

Cher set off a meme October 21 when she simply texted "I'm here" after being away from Twitter for awhile. Many people responded to finish the thought.  For example, Alanis Morrissette replied "to remind you." 

My version was "I'm here…I said to the cobwebs forming in the bathroom we use everyday."

Read other responses:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/cher-im-here-meme

https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop/9472313/chers-im-here-tweet-alanis-morissette

VpVincent Prince on the Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour

A few months ago I watched the early 1970s Dr. Phibes movies and got really into Vincent Price, "the Gable of Gothic," even buying one of his cookbooks and reading Vincent Price, A Daughter’s Biography by Victoria Price.

I found I have a few things in common with Vincent Price, including St. Louis, Missouri (growing up there I already knew that), Albuquerque, New Mexico, a love of Native American art and a love of the horror genre. So I've been watching a lot of Price movies on streaming.

Plus, one of the long lost episodes of The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour is the Vincent Price episode so I was interested to know if Victoria Price would mention this episode in her book. I actually had trouble finding it at first. Turns out her parents were going through a divorce that year which took up most of the chronological section of the book in 1973. In chapter 29 where she catches up with Vincent Price’s early 1970s TV appearances she covers the show:

“…I did meet a few famous people who really impressed me. During my one allowed hour of television I often watched reruns of I Love Lucy, so when my father guest-starred on The Lucy Show in 1970, my mother took me to watch the taping…A few years later, my father took me with him to tape an episode of The Sonny & Cher Show [really really the Comedy Hour]. I had seen the famous duo on TV, and was causally interested in meeting them. Their daughter Chastity was a baby, and I was introduced to both mother and daughter in what seemed more like an exotic boudoir than a typical studio dressing room. But much more exciting than meeting Cher was meeting their other guest star, George Forman, who had just been crowed heavyweight boxing champion of the world. He seemed so big that when he shook my hand I was afraid he would crush it. But he had the gentlest handshake. I was thrilled to meet him because I was a sports fanatic. Growing up in Hollywood, I never idolized movie stars. I never found them glamourous because it seemed to me that they were simply my father’s colleagues. But sports were another thing. And animals. For my tenth birthday, I was taken to meet my favorite movie star—Lassie.”

Chastity too was duly impressed by Lassie when the dog appeared on The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour.

George Foreman actually didn’t end up airing with the Vincent Price episode. This isn’t unusual as guest stars were probably filmed, cut and aired as needed. Vincent Price’s episode aired with The Temptations on December 5, 1973 (Jerry Lewis had the Halloween spot for some unfathomable reason). George Foreman ended up in the #56 and #60 episodes which aired on December 12, 1973, and January 16, 1974 respectively.

Cher Once Did Needlepoint; Now She Valiantly Defends the United States Post Office

Cher Works to Save the Post Office

Excuse my title up there. I really didn't know how to tie all these disparate stories together.

First off, fans have been delighted to see Cher fighting for the U.S. post office in recent protests, phone calls and Twitter pics.

Cherpo3

Cherpo1Cherpo2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I hope if she starts volunteering for the post office, Bob Mackie designs her some "sensible shoes."

Cher and Needlepoint 

Months ago someone was requested photos of celebrity needlepointers like Dinah Shore and Rosey Grier. I found as many as I could but one photo I remembered proved elusive to locate. Then Cher scholar Drew asked me a question and I went searching for the answer to that but instead found the missing needlepoint pic. Maybe someday I'll locate the answer to Drew's question while I'm looking for something else. 

Anyway, Cher once did lots of needlpoint. She did so much she joked, "Then I took up needlepoint—my God, I needlepointed everything. I could have made a needlepoint stove!"

Cher needlepoints on airplanes:

20200815_10501820200418_173755 20200815_105018

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cher needlepoints circa 1978/9.

20200418_173755

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also captured an image of Sonny pretending to needlepoint in episode #49 of The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour:

Needlept

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here are some needlepoints of Cher:

Sandcneedles Sandcneedles

 

 

 

 

 

Time Time

 

 

 

 

The Time Magazine pillow belonged to Bob Mackie and sold for $448 on Julien's Acutions.

You can buy the Moonstruck needlepoint pattern on Etsy with a companion Nicholas Cage!

What is a Silkwood Shower?

For the Chersonian Institute, I was filing old magazines and found something interesting. Remember when Entertainment Weekly did a Bullseye pieceon the last page? Do they still do that? Anyway, one I found had a disparaging arrow regarding a rumor that Bret Michaels and Miley Cyrus’ mom were dating. ET says the rumor has sent them “running for a Silkwood shower.” Ok, that's a big rude. And I wondered if that was like…a saying. Apparently it is. Urban Dictionary has a listing for it with this example:

“I had to take a Silkwood shower when I got home from that party since I smelled like an ash tray cooked on an open flame BBQ grill covered in hot sauce.”

So "snap out of it, Moonstruck eggs and the Jack speech are not the only iconic references from a Cher movie.

Here are some shots of a Silkwood shower. It's a pretty serious and scary thing and Meryl rocks it (as did Sudie Bond earlier in the movie). 

Silkwood2 Silkwood2 Silkwood2

 

 

 

1999showCher Concert Reviews

Concert reviews have changed. I've learned this lesson over the last year from various sources from current reviewers and from the deceased reviewers. Is this overwhelming evidence of capitalism taking over PR? Probably. Which is no such a great thing. Buyer beware, there are no objective reviews in the land of corporate conglomeration. 

So it’s good to look back at a positive review and interview from 1999 (when bad reviews still existed) and this one was by T’cha Dunlevy at the Montreal Gazette is one of those. She was 30 when she reviewed the Believe-era concert and said she

“regularly feels aversion to refuse-to-die ‘60s rock acts. I had no convulsions of revulsion at the Camp Queen’s coup. Maybe it’s her synthetic, timeless beauty or her go-with-the-flow versatility, but Cher has somehow kept her proverbial cool over her three-and-a-half decades in the spotlight…a repetoir of personae, including pop-ditty princess, serious actor, 'I’m-in-love-with-a-man-half-my-age' bachelorette, reactionary mother of a lesbian [remember this was 1999] and, in her 50s. back to the top of the pops without coming off like a circus side-show act.”

“…'How many fingers and toes have you got?’ she asks, queried about whether she’s ever thought of giving up. ‘(It happens) all the time. It’s frustrating. I’m a very mercurial, emotional person, more childish sometimes than grownup. I’m not very calculating. But it’s the only think I know how to do and really love.’”

The end of the interview also notes that both Cyndi Lauper and Wild Orchid were opening for Cher at the time, the same Wild Orchid that produced Stacy Ferguson a.k.a. Fergie Duhamel a.k.a Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas. 

Cher in Black Glass by Karen Joy Fowler

BlackglassA good friend of mine sends me lots of good books for birthdays and Christmas, some of them collections of short fiction. I've accumulated so many I need to start reading them to clear off a book shelf. Not all of them are my cup of tea so I usually attempt to read each story at least. If the writing doesn't grab me right away, I move on to another story or book. I keep the ones I really like. 

So it came time to read this one, Black Glass by Karen Joy Fowler and Cher was a prominent feature in the first three pages of the title story. Here are some screenshots. It's too much to retype.

The story opens in a bar. The Cher part on page one reads:

"Rows of cut-glass decanters filled the shelves. Schilling ran his towel over their glass stoppers. In the corner, on the big screen, Cher danced and sang a song for the U.S. Navy. Schilling had the sound off."

20200623_083340

The reference on page two: 

A drunk man comes in requesting booze. "'I don't have any money,' said the man. Cher closed her eyes and opened her mouth."

20200623_083448The reference on page three:

People are drinking, minding their own business: "A second shaft of sunlight appeared in the room, collided with the mirrored wall. Inside the sunlight, barely visible, Cher danced."

Then "a nightmare in the shape on an enormous post menopausal woman" comes in holding a hatchet and a rock and she "hit the big screen dead center with the rock. The screen cracked and smoked, make spitting noises, blackened." 

End of Cher in the story.

20200623_083558

This was actually nothing against Cher, this woman smashing the monitor. She was a Fire-and-Brimstone messenger come to scare the patrons over the evils of alcohol. After all the violence in the bar which runs for a few pages, we switch to a scene with a DEA agent and I lost interest here. I ended up not finishing any of the stories in the book.

Sometimes when you have too many books, you gotta make some tough choices.    

From the Chersonian Archive: Joni Mitchell Lyrics

Mitchellgeffen

Apologies to the Cher scholar who brought these lyrics to my attention. I printed them out to look at later and then years and years went by and I recently dug them out of the Chersonian Institute's messy archive.

There's speculation that references to Cher can be found in the lyrics of two Joni Mitchell songs. Here's what we do know: Joni Mitchell, Cher and David Geffen lived in the same house for a time while Cher was dating Geffen in 1973-74. Mitchell and Geffen are quoted mentioning this situation. When Cher left Geffen for Gregg Allman, Geffen admits he was distraught to distraction and had to seek therapy. He also states Cher was his only girlfriend. So the pool of possibilities here is very small (like Cher) if in fact Mitchell is referring to David Geffen in these two songs.

Let's take a look. Good sleuthing Cher scholar!

From her song "Love or Money" from the 1974 concert album Miles of Ailses.

Full lyrics: https://jonimitchell.com/music/song.cfm?id=190
Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfplwJaBN1E

Specific lyrics that seem David Geffen related:

The firmament of Tinsel Town
Is strung with tungsten stars
Lots of forty watt successes
He says where's my own shining hour
He's the well kept secret of the underground
He's in debt to the company store

Specific lyrics that seem Cher-related:

His only channeled aspiration
was getting back the girl he had before…

All because that ghostly girl comes haunting
Just out of reach outside his bed
And she kicks the covers off his sleep
For the clumsy things he said
She commands his head she tries his sanity
She demands his head tonight unknowingly

Vaguely she floats and lacelike
Blown in like a curtain on the night wind
She's nebulous and naked
He wonders where she's been
He grabs at the air because there's nothing there
Her evasiveness stings him
With long legs-long lonely legs
Bruised from banging into things

One day he was standing just outside her door
He was carrying an armload of bright balloons
She just laughed
She said she heard him knocking
And she teased him for the moon…

he tried but he could not get it down
for love or money

This song was recorded in March and August of 1974, in the turmoil of Geffen and Cher's relationship.

 

Form "Off Night Backstreet" from the 1977 album Don Juan's Reckless Daughter.

Full lyrics: https://jonimitchell.com/music/song.cfm?id=169
Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yrsub53A9EE

There are no overt references to David Geffen in the song but these are the possible Cher-related lyrics:

You pimp – laughing and strutting her to my chartered seat…
now she's moved in with you
She's keeping your house neat
and your sheets sweet…

who left her long black hair
in our bathtub drain?

This is a much later song, the album was recorded in 1977 and could be referring to another Mitchell relationship and another mysterious girl. 

« Older posts

© 2024 I Found Some Blog

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑