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Category: Cher Outfit Watch (Page 1 of 9)

Little Bites

Little Bites (2024) - IMDbSpeaking of Little Bites, here is a post to catch up on bits and bites of the Cher news we’re behind on.

Lawsuits

Cher and her son, Elijah Allman, have come to an agreement via mediation and Cher has dropped her conservatorship lawsuit. More info:

Cher won her royalties lawsuit against Mary Bono. More info:

Chaz Bono Appearances

Chaz Bono recently spoke in Rochester, New York, at a sobriety event and also discussed his family’s history of addiction and mental health struggles.

Chaz Bono’s new movie Little Bites also premieres this Friday, October 9. Not in my town but the step-and-repeat wall indicates the movie might be coming to streaming on Shudder. I will be able to watch it there.

Watch the Trailer

It looks scary! Reviews have so far been mixed but it has a 70% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The premiere was held in Los Angeles on October 3. Cher is listed as Executive Producer on the film and attended.

You might recognize this jacket from the late 1980s People Magazine picture in New York City. One of my favorite Cher pictures.

Ted Lasso and Cher

Ted Lasso (TV Series 2020–2023) - IMDbThere are few good things I have to say about this shitty, heartbreaking year. But one of them is the time I’ve spent watching an amazing show called Ted Lasso. My family has been prodding me to watch this show for a while now but I didn’t have AppleTV.  The show has a strong foundation of kindness and perseverance and goes against the grain of decades of Machiavellian TV plots. We have been so bombarded with fictional and reality characters showing us all the ways we can be assholes, it’s refreshing to see something that shows us all the ways to not be assholes…and still maintain dramatic interest, as if assholery is the only thing that could.

The show is well-written and full of inspiring sayings like “aint nothing to it but to do it.”

Anyway, it’s was a happy thing that Cher makes a few of the show’s references in Season 2, episodes 7 and 9.

Episode 7 opens with the song “I Got You Babe” played in its entirety to show all is not blissful in the relationship between Roy Kent and Keely Jones.

In Episode 9, “Bones & Honey,” we follow the character Beard through an episode-long adventure not unlike the movie Nobody mashed up with Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. Beard proposes taking some Richmond football fans to the ellusive club Bones & Honey to sneak in as nonmembers. One of the characters is doubtful, saying “even Cher couldn’t get in! Do you believe they did that to Cher?” complete with pitch voice.

Later when Beard does get them in, the characters are amazed, saying “You did what Cher couldn’t do!”

It was interesting to get the show’s read on the cultural meaning of Cher as a person who is normally cool enough to get in anywhere. Like the coolest of the cool.

Sammy Hagar

While I was in Boston, my oldest brother Andrew told me about driving from Champaign/Urbana to St. Louis with a bunch of his frat mates to see Sammy Haggar play a 1983 show at the Checkerdome for an MTV special. Recently I had to make an unplanned visit to Cleveland where my other brother Randy admitted he was also at that show.

I watched the concert on a bootleg recently and was struck by all the big stage props in it, the crane rigging Sammy Hagar climbs up and hangs off of like a monkey, the hot rod Hagar jumps on. It’s a fun show.

But these pieces of staging aren’t that different from Cher’s big shoe and lava lamps, just people designing shows for the last row of their arenas. Instead of dancers hanging from cranes, Hagar just did it himself.

He was just designing a more masculine show and so no one ever accused him of putting a car up on stage to detract from his music or due to his lack of talent.

Funny that.

Cher Show on the Road

New dates have been released for the traveling version of the Broadway Cher Show. I will be seeing one of these in 2025.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony

It appears Cher will perform. Ozzy will not. My Ozzy-loving friend Julie has talked me into attending the ceremony. We’ll be going with my brother Randy (of the aforementioned Sammy Hagar show which is ironic because Sammy Hagar is also attending). It seems Dua Lipa is slated to do the Cher tribute. This is a bit disappointing. I was hoping some older, establishment person would do the honors. But in many ways Cher is all about the future, not the past. But these legend tributes seem to always come from younger artists like Gwen Stefani (except when Steven Tyler did it or, recently, Meryl Streep).

The show will air on Disney+ which is just about the most unrock-and-roll channel imaginable (except that The Mayhem are on Disney+).

Last week the Hall of Fame released a tweet about Cher which was a closer look type thing. They mentioned her “distinctive voice”, “captivating stage presence” (which is way short of the real fact that she always steals focus), her “avant-garde fashion sense” (which is way short of calling out her huge rock-fashion influence), that she is a “generational force” (short for saying we didn’t think she would last this long), her “tenacious talent,” (which sounds great but what does that even mean?), and her “musical versatility” as showcased in the tweet with a short video on…”Believe”). What? “Believe” is important but it is hardly a showcase on her versatility. They should have referenced instead samples of her dance, rock, folk, pop, country, rap, r&b, torch, showtunes, opera, gospel and new wave music. Is that the best they could do?

I am going to this with a bit of skepticism that the Hall of Fame really appreciates Cher yet. This could just be the long-standing chip I have on my shoulder. But I just hope, if nothing else, we get a snapshot of Cher with Sammy Hagar out of this. I could usefully troll some brothers with that.

Dear Sonny & Cher from 16 Magazine, Part 10

What a great Cher smile in this issue of “Dear Cher….and Sonny” from 16 Magazine!

Let’s return to the conversation about whether or not Sonny & Cher had anything to do with this advice column enterprise. I had a conversation with another Cher scholar last week who knows some behind-the-scenes workings of another teen magazine of the day and in that magazine (and most likely this one I suppose), stars were just brand-stamps on articles written by staff.

This is easy to believe with the Cher responses, especially considering how shy she was/is. However, I have a harder time disconnecting Sonny from his answers (or from Cher’s answers either, truth be told). How likely would it be to capture his sort of hippie-masquerading, dated sexism with some staff writer on the 16 Magazine? Okay, well maybe not so unlikely. I wasn’t even born yet so I have no idea what the conditions of the teen-rag patriarchy were back then orhow many old hacks were advising teen girls how to flirt.

But whether it was Sonny and/or Cher answering these questions doesn’t really matter all that much at the end of the day. The kids believed it was Sonny and Cher responding to these questions. And this was all-of-a-piece image-making for Sonny and Cher as “friends of their fans” which seemed to be Sonny’s strategy at the time. Their casualness with fans was part of their brand. So we can continue here, like swell tween fans, to believe this is really Sonny & Cher.

 

If your young life is full of problems there’s no need for you to suffer alone. In fact, there’s no need for you to suffer at all. Cher—and Sonny—want to help you—right here in the pages of 16!

Hi! Here were are again—Cher and Sonny—and we’re as eager as ever to help you solve your problems. So please, please write to us and tell us what’s wrong in your life, and we’ll do our absolute best to make it right. If you feel that your problem is something Cher can best help you with, address your letter to Cher. And if you feel that Sonny can best advise you on your particular worry, address your letter to Sonny. You know that you can depend on both of us to help you all we can—and we’re always here, in every issue of 16 Magazine.

Dear Cher, There are two new boys in my class who seem to be very nice and who are quite cute. Both of them are shy and haven’t talked to or taken notice of any girl. I would like to get to know them better, but I didn’t want to be too forward. Any suggestions? Bashful, Los Angeles, Calif.

Cher’s Response:

Dear Bashful, One good trick in a situation like this is to keep yourself in their “sights.” Maybe one day these two young hunters will decide it’s time to aim at some bird, and if you are standing there you might be the chosen one!

Cher Scholar’s Response:

First of all, I think these two boys have probably noticed the girls. Unless they’ve been noticing the boys instead. You never know. This terminology though is a relic of the 1960s: aiming, hunting, girls in sights, targets. What a bloody metaphor.

There is an allegedly inaccurate but famous quote often attributed to Cher. It apparently was said around the time she first laid eyes on her boyfriend Robert Camilletti: “Have him washed and brought to my tent.” This quote even made its way into the movie Mama Mia: Here We Go Again, spoken from the character of Christine Baranski. The movie’s makers were fans themselves of Cher and Cher’s mythology and this seemed an interesting tribute to her later cameo in the movie. But this was also one of the things in the movie that prevented us from seeing Cher as the character in the story. It took us out of that fiction and we were stuck seeing Cher as a loosely-veiled cameo character (as she has been in all too many recent Cher movies).

But aside from that, the sentiment is a bit creepy. No more appealing than being caught in the sights of a hunter. Objectifying isn’t any better coming from a woman than it is coming from a man. It’s just men don’t seem to mind it as much. This is because the consequences for being objectified aren’t so severe for them. It can be just plain fun and sexy.

All that said, in a previous blog post we were discussing flirting as a dance; and there’s surely something to be said for the imaginative side of that dance….and the playful side of the power-struggles. Here’s the issue: men can do some f**ked-up shit objectifying women and women can do some f**ked-up shit trying to overturn power-struggles with men. And with LGBTQ-relationships, the dysfunction can go any which way but loose. Humans are strange creatures. Let’s not take all the fun out of it but also realize how some of these games can get dangerous or bleed over into other aspects of our lives.

Does that sound like a difficult tightrope walk? Yeah, it does.

I actually think that sort of game-playing works once you know each other a little better first. And you have a safe word. Hornwaffle. There. You can use that one. I’m not using it.

Dear Cher, I am 13 years old and I have had the same problem for over two years. I can’t seem to make friends with girls. I had one girl friend , but I lost her. The worst thing is that boys seem to like me a lot. When a car passes me, or I go somewhere, I get waived at or yelled at. I want to be friends with girls and boys. Please tell me what to do. Worried, Carrollton, Ohio

Cher’s Response:

Dear Worried, A girl who is popular with boys usually get scratched off by girls—simply because they are jealous. I wouldn’t worry about it too much, if I were you. I remember when I was your age I didn’t have many girl friends either, but by the time I was 14 I had one really good friend and later got a couple more. I think it’s more important to have one or two good girl friends than to be popular with the “gang.”

Cher Scholar’s Response:

“Scratched off?” I had to read that a few times. Was that a hip mid-60s saying?

I don’t remember girls being jealous anymore by age 13. Maybe girls starting earlier than they did in the 1960s. (That darn Rick Springfield.) By the time we were freshman (14), even the stragglers like me where caught up in the dating drama. It was the girls who started early (11-12) who might have experienced jealousy from other girls regarding boys. But I think we’re getting in the weeds.

It was beneficial for me, as a person, to have girl friends and platonic boy friends. There’s an episode of the TV show The Goldbergs which was almost a replica of my own experience as a teen. Adam’s older brother Barry is telling him that he can’t have a platonic friendship with his platonic friend Emmy because boy/girl relationships always turn romantic. My brother told me the exact same thing once.

I now think the disagreement was due to our respective age gap. Both of my older brothers had that interim generational experience between Boomers and Gen Xers. But Gen X kids like me did have platonic relationships in the 1980s all the time. One of the reasons for this was because more Gen X gay kids were out of the closet than they were a decade earlier.  We were also much more casual with each other, regardless of sexual orientation or preference. And then again in some situations, those platonic friendships were put under pressure by changed feelings. That happened too.

But all those relationships helped us later in the workplace and in adulthood. In fact, I found it often easier to be friends with boys than girls as I got older. Girls, as I’ve noted, can be unconsciously furtive. Sometimes there’s unconscious drama at play operating at a level even girls seem unaware of.

My big problem was often making a bad or incorrect first impression. And sometimes first impressions were hard to overcome. I had to work hard at not letting that “bad foot” put me on the defensive or determine how I would behave with those women going forward. I had to learn to dismiss it and keep trying. Once someone got to know me…everything would change and a friendship could develop.

But you need time and space to turn that around. For people you don’t have the space and time to develop a more honest relationship, you have to let those relationships go and not worry about it.

I’ve made some mistakes, too, when I was young, working through how to navigate new relationships with girls. In the beginning I bartered with agreeability.  That didn’t work for anyone. Later after college, I trafficked in gossip and cattiness. That did work and although it was fun in a bitchy way, it was shallow and unsustainable both morally and professionally (cattiness can come back to bite you in the ass).

I finally settled on humor. And I could turn my natural cattiness into self-deprecation and get the same result so…

Self-deprecation is great on many levels. Self-aggrandizement is distancing, People like an underdog. And struggle is something they can sympathize with (flaws are like Velcro as we discussed previously). And ironically, it takes confidence to let yourself be seen as a flawed person.

I can’t say first impression mistakes aren’t still sometimes stressful hurdles, but if I give myself all the time in the world to turn things around, I feel okay about it.

Cher has been friends with all sorts of people. And her relationships with men and women have gone through ups and downs, both friends and lovers. It’s a journey, not a sprint.

Dear Cher, I have terrible pimples and, at times, acne. Please tell me what I can do. I am desperate. Bumpy, New York City

Cher’s Response:

Dear Bumpy, There are several things you can do, and here they are—but you really must do them: In the future, avoid all fried foods, chocolate, nuts, greasy foods, soda pop with sugar in it (the no-calorie type is better for you), butter and coconut. The next thing you must do is keep your skin clean at all times. Wash your face with a mild soap morning and evening (using a very gentle complexion brush and patting dry with a spotlessly clean towel). Carry some Fresh Ups or Wash ‘n’ Dry face cleaners with you to use from time to time during the day if necessary. There are many medicated, tinted make-ups in cream and liquid. pHisoHex puts out a very good line—you can get them at your drugstore. If your acne is bad, see your family doctor. They have some great new antibiotic injections that really work—I mean, they usually get rid of acne from one to two weeks.

Cher Scholar’s Response:

I had to look up what a complexion brush was. Turns out I have one. Huh. It also turns out pHisoHex was banned in 1972 for the use of hexachlorophene. The product has relaunched later using the ingredient salicylic acid.

There are new brands now for acne: Dermalogica, Proactiv, La Roche-Posay and new patches that work well to suffocate those little buggers overnight. You can also get LED and cortisone treatments from dermatologists.

For probably the same reason I was late in wanting boys to chase me (or to chase them all while pretending to let them chase me or whatever it was we were supposed to be doing), I didn’t have very many pimples in high school, which was lucky because I was into using acne-causing makeup and my family’s main food was Mexican so avoiding fried tortillas and greasy food was inconceivable.

That all happened in my 20s. And I remember having an argument with a dermatologist around that time about antibiotics, which were all the rage then for treating acne. I was really into animal rights issues and had read all about the overuse of antibiotics in humans and farm animals and how this was going to wreck havoc on us years down the line when antibiotics would lose their effectiveness. Doctors (like this very dermatologist) were very dismissive of animal rights intellectuals at the time and their ideas. I lost the argument and used the antibiotics but those arguments did win-out 30 to 40 years later and now doctors take it for granted that we’ve overused antibiotics. I don’t even see that as a  recommendation for treatment for acne these days.

In the mid-1980s, one or both (I can’t remember) of Cher’s former managers, Charlie Greene and Brian Stone, gave a tell-all interview about Cher to one of the tabloids (The Enquirer or Star). It was pretty mean. One of the things mentioned was how much junk food Cher ate in the 1960s and how bad her acne was.

The only letter I’ve ever sent to Cher was over this article. I was 12 or 13 and was incensed by it. God knows what rant about the article I sent off. I got back a thank-you on a postcard.

But Cher has been very open about her love of Jack-in-the-Box tacos and her now-occasional indulgence of them.

She’s also been open about the acne she had in the early 1970s when The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour started and the heavy makeup caused her skin to break out. You can sometimes catch a glimpse of that situation during close-ups in early solo numbers. It was around that time that Cher became interested in skin care, an interest that led her to launch her own skin care product line, Aquasentials, in the 1990s.

Dear Sonny, I would like your honest opinion. I have a good complexion, a nice figure and am fairly cute, but I have one thing boys hate—I wear glasses! I can’t stand them, but I can’t see without them. I just lost two boyfriends because of them. I am 14 and really dig guys, but my four-eyes make me lose my cool. Help!, Chicago, Ill.

Sonny’s Response:

Dear Help!, Hold on there a minute. Wearing glasses may bother but you, but it’s not all that big a problem. First off, eyeglasses are very in and very groovy looking these days, as we all know. Maybe you ought to look a little deeper. Maybe you are losing those guys you dig because of some other reason—one you won’t even admit to yourself as yet. Give it some thought. Now, if the fact is you have to wear really thick lenses, I can only suggest that you get your parents to take you to a good optometrist who will advise you as to whether or not you can wear contact lenses. Many, many people wear them and love them. (John Lennon and Mark Lindsay do.) Why don’t you give it a go?

Cher Scholar’s Response:

One time I was working as a receptionist for a interior designer in St. Louis. One of their clients, a gay male designer, once called and referred to me as “the girl with the glasses.” I found this horrifying and had contacts within a week.

But as I learned from Mr. Cher Scholar years later, some people have a fetish for girls who wear glasses. After all, this was a major plot-point of Adam Ant’s video for “Goody Two Shoes.” And then there’s the character of Bailey in the TV show WCRP in Cincinnati. Mr. Cher Scholar explained to me one day that some men found her much more attractive than the Jennifer Marlow character. I found this impossible to believe because Loni Anderson was such a phenomenon at the time.

So I went online and found out there’s a whole group of guys who feel this way. Apparently, they’re more into the girl next door than the sexy mama. Huh. Each to his own.

Cher can really work some glasses. And they were a good prop for her character in the movie Suspect.

Dear Sonny, I am 13 years old and have an unusual problem. I am really very ugly. People tell I’m cute just to make me feel good. I only wish I could live up to what they say, but no matter what I do—like try different haircombs or makeup—I just seem to get uglier. Please help me. Ugly, Miami, Fla.

Sonny’s Response:

Dear Ugly, I have said this before and I repeat: there is beauty in each and every one of us. If you would just stop dwelling on your bad points, perhaps your good points would start shining through. The best advice I can give you is to be yourself, to accept yourself and to be honest (but optimistic) in everything you do. Each individual is unique; each of us is endowed with God’s great gift of life, and each of us has a mission to fulfill while we are here. In other words, there is a purpose and meaning to all things and all individuals. Don’t deny yours and yourself. You don’t have to be a hippy or be in with the in crowd. An exterior beauty is something that fades, whereas inner beauty grows and grows as the years go by. 

Cher Scholar’s Response:

You don’t have to be a hippie? Who said you had to be a hippie? What’s that got to do with anything?

I’m still working my way through the Susan Day book. I had to skip the end of the section about boys. It was too much, except for the “so you want to date a star” chapter which was a real page turner, not least because it brought comments and suggestions in again from David Cassidy who was the teen idol of the day. Oddly though Susan Dey did not consider herself a star worthy of consideration in that chapter.

And she was every bit a star. Full disclosure, I haven’t seen episodes of The Partridge Family. Well, maybe one episode on VH-1 decades later when that channel went retro in the mid-1990s. My local stations in St. Louis didn’t carry The Partridge Family during the years I was watching after-school TV. And I watched a lot of it. Even My Three Sons which I hated and Gilligan’s Island which I was ambivalent about. I was definitely on team Marsha as a result because I watched The Brady Bunch hundreds of times.

But I also didn’t care for the Reuben Kincaid character at all or Danny Bonaduce or the two little kids or Shirley Jones. I basically only liked David Cassidy, Susan Dey and the bus. In fact, if the show could have been just about the bus, I would have been thrilled. I was a real fan of the bus.

In any case, the next section of the Susan Dey book gets much better. Things improve after she moves on to beauty tricks. She talks about a simple-style of beauty, avoiding a lot of makeup. She talks about radiance. Which is akin to my idea of energy. Some people don’t have all the right facial features in all the “right” places, but they radiate a beautiful energy.

Also, we can’t ever see ourselves how others see us. Cher, throughout her life, has labeled herself ugly, as a child to her mother, on the 1978 TV special recreating the episode of her child self talking to her mother and during disagreements with Mike Nichols on the set of Silkwood. It’s pretty incredible but what can she do? You have two eyes and a brain and a point of view. It’s not so easy to trust the opinions of others when they contract with what’s in front of your very own eyes.

Add to that the fact that a mirror shows you everything backwards and then there’s the complication of body dysmorphia for some people. You just have to let it go. You can’t be self-defined by the container of yourself. It’s impossible to figure out. Like the existence of God.

Read more Dear Sonny & Cher from 16 Magazine

Dear Sonny & Cher from 16 Magazine, Part 5

What a picture this week! Cher is wearing some future-Cher-signature hoop earrings. She was literally before her own time, not just everybody else’s time. This is also classic 60s-Cher with the thick eyeliner and the neutral lips, the thick bangs. She looks slightly miffed, like kids are writing to her via 16 Magazine and they are not telling her how old they were. (Can you believe it?)

This also marks the last solo effort of this column. From now on, Sonny will weigh in on questions, too. Maybe his new movie-mogul schedule has freed up. Who knows. The bottom line is Cher only got through three of them by herself.

 

If your young life is full of problems, there’s no need for you to suffer alone. In fact, there’s no need for you to suffer at all. Cher wants to help you—right here in the pages of 16!

Dear Cher, Do you think it is wrong for a girl to try and make herself look like another girl? For instance, I think you are beautiful and I model my hair, clothes and looks after you. Who would I try to look like? I flip for John Lennon. Worried, Niagara Falls, Ont.

Cher’s Response:

Dear Worried, Since you didn’t say how old you are, it is hard to give you advice. You 16-ers must remember to state your age when you writer to me—as that does make a difference. If you are 14 or younger, I think it is quite a good thing to choose another girl whom you admire to model yourself after. However, as you get older, you should start discovering yourself. You should—sooner or later—get your own style. That’s like letting the real you emerge. Everybody starts by copying, but in the end they must come to themselves. I agree with you that John Lennon is quite flippy.

Cher Scholar’s Response:

From Canada. She’s getting international letters now! I think this is a very good response, except for the scoldy you-16-ers part…and the part about John Lennon being flippy. I don’t agree with them on that one and the comment itself seems aside from the question. Just a non-sequitur. Maybe it was a hey, girl-to-girl thing, look at that hottie John Lennon. Wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

Truth be told, I don’t find any of the Beatles “flippy” or handsome and I know this will piss off millions of Boomer ladies by saying that. I have always struggled with the mandatory exercise of “picking my Beatle” and I have defaulted to Paul just because he and his wife Linda sided with the animals and Linda had a line of TV-dinners taste-tested in St. Louis. The dinners didn’t ever “go” but it was back when there were no vegetarian TV dinners in grocery stores and, incidentally, they were very tasty and so I also have her cookbook. You could argue I’m more of a Linda McCartney fan. But I do like the Beatles themselves. It’s more of a problem of picking a cute one. (And Cher Scholar’s gonna drop some catty bits here).  I contend that there is a fatal flaw in each of the Beatle faces. I had these thoughts watching the excellent Get Back documentary. For Ringo, yes, unfortunately it is the nose. For Paul, it’s those droopy eyes that most Boomer girls did indeed flip for. George Harrison has the most classically handsome face, but I can’t get past those teeth. For John Lennon, the eyes, nose and teeth are fine. It’s his mouth.

That all is needlessly (and maybe inappropriately) said because quantifying beauty is very subjective and cultural. For example. I love Cher’s older crooked teeth. I don’t like George Harrison’s crooked teeth. Probably sentimentality plays into our evaluations more than we like to admit. I have no sentimental attachment to the Beatles so I can nit-pick away. Maybe if I was an older person, I would have joined my peers and “flipped.” As it was, I was born later and flipped (and floundered) for people in my 1980s-teen-era instead. (However, I did not pick a Duran Duran member either. Sigh. Okay, maybe it’s me.)

And how are all these I-want-to-look-like-you Cher questions coming through the slush pile anyway? Is that the bulk of the mail coming in? Are they choosing only questions that discuss Cher beauty or Cher hair? Which is an interesting marketing strategy to pick only those questions that made Cher look good (but look at me being all conspiracy theory right now).

I am fascinated by these changing age borderlines in the 16 Magazine responses. Like was some teen-psychologist being consulted? Age 14 seems like the fulcrum of many changes in one’s life. Boys getting more sensible with girls, girls coming into their “real you-ness.” The real Eunice, as it were. How can I get to my real Eunice?

I actually love the idea that you begin to discover your own look by copying others and then making small tweaks away from that copy, so many tweaks that eventually you won’t recognize the source. I would love to hear (or read) about Cher’s childhood models, what and from whom she copied to finally define her Cherness, her Eunice. And I think this practice applies to probably everything we do as creative people or thinkers. We model other things until we understand the thing fair enough to try out tweaks for ourselves. There’s some great quote out there about artists who become great because they fail at trying to be someone else.

I was 15 or 16 when the Cher movie Mask came out. But since I was a slow kid, let’s just say I had the maturity of a 14-year old and that’s being generous. Watching the movie in the theaters I remember thinking Cher looked so great and that of all the eras of Cher, this look seemed somewhat copy-able for a girl from Missouri. You know, a sprinkle of hillbilly in there? Her 1960s-hippy chic look: eh. The glamourous TV star look: not do-able. Biker chick: possibly. Looking back it seems folly but I did try it out. And the form it took was to copy her character’s white undershirts and ribbon/shoestring necklaces. The shirts didn’t work immediately. But I did wear those shoestring necklaces all through my Sophomore year until I decided, you know, I’m not really a choker-necklace person.

Dear Cher, I have very dark, coarse hair on my forearms and on my face. Do you have any suggestion as to how I could get rid of this unwanted hair? Hairy, Ft. Collins, Col. 

Cher’s Response:

Dear Hairy, YOU FORGOT TO GIVE YOUR AGE!! If you are under 16, I advise you to try to ignore this excess hair for the time being. It may just be a passing thing and soon gradually begin to disappear. But if you are over 16, it is probably going to be a permanent problem, and you should speak to your family doctor about recommending a good electrolysist. There are people who scientifically remove hairs permanently—one at a time. Do not use “hair removing” creams and plasters on your body or face, as it is very dangerous.

Cher Scholar’s Response:

First of all, THE YELLING!! Maybe 16 Magazine needs a form kids can fill out to send in with their letter. That would eliminate all the forgetting to tell Cher what age you are. I now feel compelled by these stern reprimands to give my age when I have a question for anyone. “I’m 55!” That’s got to be the boundary of some kind of life cycle change, right? Wait a minute. Maybe Cher should start an AARP advice column right now! “Dear Cher, I’m 55 and not yet having hot flashes like all my friends? Am I a freak of nature. I feel so left out. What should I do?”

And I notice the age boundary has moved to 16 in this case. I hope there’s a chart somewhere of all these teen thresholds. Or is 16 just the age when girls can start going through draconian beauty practices? Boys can get drafted into the military at 18; girls can start electrolysis at 16?

There is some intense social pressure to be hairless, oddly. As a race, human animals are turning into hairless cats. I personally like hair on people, cats and dogs. And I know some very beautiful girls with hairy arms. In the third grade, a girl named Laura moved to our neighborhood from somewhere in the south. She sat next to me and we became friends for a year. All the boys went nuts. She was very pretty and had a southern accent. And hairy arms. The boys did not care. She was the most popular girl that year.

It’s interesting that this response differentiates between removing hair scientifically as opposed to what? Magically? I think they mean these snake-oil type remedies. You know, the whole skin care industry basically. I have a love-hate relationship with skin care products and I wrote about this extensively in Cher Zine 3, “Cher and Your Skin (The Infomercials).”

Hair removal has come along way (err, scientifically) since the 1960s. Just look at this Wikipedia page with its hilarious drawings of human hair and old-tyme ads for hair removal. There is now sugaring, threading, drugs, laser, IPL, diode epilation.

One thing is for certain, people care an awful lot about their hair. It’s a very serious business. Do I have too much? Not enough? One good thing about hair is that you can play with it.

Dear Cher, My father is in the Army and we lived in Europe for five years until about five months ago.  Before I left, all of my friends told me they would write to me. I have written to them all and given them my new address, and not a single one has responded. What is wrong with me—or with them? Now that I have gone, have they forgotten me? Depressed, Ft. Ord. Calif.

Cher’s Response:

Dear Depressed, Nothing is wrong with you or them—except that you are all human beings acting in a very human way. You remembered to write and [were] anxious to hear from them. In fact, it was probably easier for you to spend a lot of time writing to your old friends, rather than make new ones. They, however, still have each other, and are not lonely—though I am sure they miss you and speak of you often (and also feel guilty about not writing). But you should also remember that writing a letter is hard for your former friends, as they are all caught up in the busy life they share. That doesn’t mean they think ill of you. Don’t be such a pessimist. Go out and get some new buddies and start all over. When you remember the past, think only of the good things and—if you feel so inclined—if you feel so inclined—just drop your old friends a happy little picture postcard from time to time,. You’ll make out all right—you’ll see.

Cher Scholar’s Response:

Europeans!

I was a big nerd and also in French class so I had a lot of international pen pans in high school. The two pals who petered out first were the boy from Germany and the boy from France. I really don’t think this is because they were Europeans. I think this is because (can we all agree?) they were boys. My best pen pals were from New Mexico (Maureen I had as a pen pal the longest, through my twenties, and yet have never met her, even though I lived in the small city of Santa Fe for three years where she was from and probably still living), the French-Canadian (who wrote to me in French and I returned letters to her in English) and the girl from the Philippines (who wrote to me until the Marcos were deposed and then I never heard from her again). So it’s situational is what I’m saying.

I guess I’m pretty hot-headed because I didn’t spend much time making additional attempts after one went unanswered. So for this question I went to one of my bffs, Julie, to get advice. She has a remarkable reputation among our group for doing something we call “never forcing a falling out.” You know, sometimes you get fed up with a friend and you “force a falling out.” You instigate trouble to cull that friend from your herd. This may be a catty girl thing to do but we would often find Julie in a situation where “forcing a falling out” would seem beneficial and we would recommend she do it and she would never do it. Admirable really. So I told her this scenario and she texted me back: “I wouldn’t send more than two unanswered letters unless this was a really long-time relationship, then maybe three or four. And I would probably try calling if it was a long-term relationship before accepting being ghosted.” We then discussed the word ghosting and me using it here in this anachronistic scenario and we decided it was a very useful term. Because ghosting was happening long before “ghosted” was a word. To be clear, ghosting is not nice. To force a falling out is, although still dysfunctional, somewhat nicer. At least the victim has closure.

I do like the idea of converting to postcards as a way to touch base without the pressure of a response. “Remember me? I’m in America now doing obnoxious American things! Thbbbbffttt!” Then again, I can see where that wouldn’t help things much.

There’s probably not much hope in this sort of situation and I see Cher now giving me the stern Cher-stare and saying, “Cher Scholar, don’t be such a pessimist!”

Dear Cher, I have fat thighs. I am not tall, so it really shows on me. I am 14 years old. [Thank God she said how old she was!] What should I do? Out Of Shape, Bossier City, La.

Cher’s Response:

Be glad you are 14—for that means that some of this weight is still “baby fat” and it will slowly disappear in the next couple of years. However, I think you should practice rolling around on the floor. [Is this code for sex?] What you do is recline on the floor propped up by your arms with your elbows straight. Point your toes and stiffen your leg muscles. Now slowing roll over to the right as far as you can. Hold it for a moment, and then slowly roll all the way back to your left. Repeat this 25 times a day, and within two weeks your measurements will be on the way down.

Cher Scholar’s Response:

Roll around on the floor?? There’s not a better, more “scientific” name for this exercise? Ok, I’m gonna try it. Hold on a minute…

Okay I don’t think I did this right because it seemed more of a workout for my arms than my thighs, which were also chubby as kid. I have a distinct memory of being in my Wonder Woman swimsuit down at our neighborhood pool where Lillian, Diana and I would yell “Laugh at Me,” (after Sonny’s solo opus, no kidding and no idea why), and then jumping into the pool and grabbing at each other underwater and then Lillian coming up to tell me she found my legs chubby. And I wasn’t mad about it but I do remember being a bit irritated, thinking “Oh great, now I have to worry about my legs.”

Those chubby legs turned into tween-anorexic skinny legs (you saw that coming) and then I had a decade in my late-teens and twenties with normal legs and now we’re back to elderly chubby legs again.

I just did a google search that made me feel a bit fat- shamey: “best workout for fat thighs.” I got the usual suspects: lunges, squats, dead lifts with weights and jumping jacks (which are hard on your knees…just ask Jane Fonda).

Cher obviously couldn’t have thrown this out in the mid-1960s but there will come a time in the 1990s when Cher would turn into somewhat of a fitness guru. So we have quite a suite of workouts, guides and encouragements to suggest now.

Cher’s VHS A New Attitude, a step workout, was released in 1991. Body Confidence was released in 1992 with weight band exercises and a hot dance. When these came out, I just watched them while eating ice cream. I was thin then and the devil may care. Years ago I actually bought a step and tried the workouts. They were good and hard. The most distracting thing about them is the fact Cher is really overdressed in them. And that is kind of a turn off somehow. She does honestly struggle through her own workouts sometimes and that is refreshing. But to show up dressed for singing “Turn Back Time” is not motivating for those of us who do not have Turn-Back-Time-fits or care to.

In 1991, Cher also came out with a nutrition and fitness book, co-authored by nutritionist Robert Haas (who wrote Eat to Win), not to be confused with the poet Robert Hass (who wrote “The Nineteenth Century as a Song“).

Cher also did a series of commercials for Jack LaLanne gyms from 1984 to 1989. You can get some inspiration for your fat thighs here by listening to some memorable Cher epigrams about sweating:

 

Read more Dear Sonny & Cher from 16 Magazine

Cher Space and Time

While I was working nightshift last week, to stay awake I made a list of scenes, movements and styles Cher has been involved with over the decades. This is kind of a piggy-back to the music legitimacy article I did last week and thinking about prior categories I might have missed. But also thinking beyond music. Here it is:

– Part of the mid-1960s Southern California Pop scene with the Mamas and the Papas, the Byrds, the Beach Boys, the Turtles and the Association

– A member of Phil Spector’s Gold Star Studios circle

– Records made with The Wrecking Crew

– One of the first records made at Muscle Shoals Recording Studio

– A top participant in the Golden Age of Variety Television

– Worked with comedy-television icon, producer George Schlatter and his slate of shows

– First Met Gala fashion Icon

– A Vogue cover girl in the Richard Avedon era

– The Crown Jewel of Bob Mackie

– A hot ticket in Old Las Vegas in the late 1970s (the Sinatra/Barely-Post-Elvis Vegas)

–  Part of the Studio 54 scene

– A late-allowed MTV participant but made MTV history with a pretty tame video that was banned from daytime MTV (while in her 40s!)

– Acted under the iconic auteur directors of the 1960s and 1970s: Robert Altman, Mike Nichols, Peter Bogdanovich, Peter Yates, Norman Jewison and Franco Zeffirelli

– Infomercial Queen
Can I just say I still love the infomercials and I may be the only one. In a recent bio-drama, I heard the statement made that Cher had fought so hard for acting respectability and then blew it with these. But did she fight so hard for respectability?  I thought that was what the whole thumbing her nose at the Academy with the 1986 dress was about. Why wouldn’t she thumb her nose at them again with infomercials? Unless you only thumb your nose as an outsider? I am totally fine with Cher going off-script with these postmodern delights.

– Auto-tune ground zero (while in her 50s!)

– Spearheading the big circus live show before subsequent fierce divas followed suit (while in her 50s and 60s!)

–  Newly sainted and recurring Icon Award recipient (while in her 70s!)

 

In the bio-drama mentioned above Josiah Howard can be seen talking about how long Cher has been famous and how she has become part of everybody’s cultural memory because, “we remember it all.” She has become time itself.

Rock and Roll Royalties and Royalty

Rock and Roll Royalties

Cher has won her battle over Sonny & Cher song royalties with Sonny’s widow, Mary Bono. The court ruled that the “terminations rights” section of the Copyright Act does not trump a divorce agreement, which gave Cher 50% of the royalties on Sonny &Cher songs. Mary Bono and her family of heirs still maintain the other 50% of Sonny’s royalties.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the “isn’t Cher rich enough” thing. I think here is where it is important to remember that of all the wealth Sonny & Cher accumulated from 1964-1975, Cher received nothing. In fact, the contracts were written so much in Sonny’s favor that, at the divorce, Cher was forced to pay Sonny millions in “lost future earnings” due to their act breaking up. So for all Cher’s work for ten years, she walked away with their house and primary custody of Chastity, which she ended up sharing with Sonny anyway because, as she said at the time, she wasn’t about to take Chastity’s father away from her.

And although Cher didn’t write the songs, her participation in them made them hits and this divorce settlement can be seen as a reparation of that great abuse of contracts a man made against his own wife.

Rock and Roll Royalty

Paul Grein has written a great article called “12 Reasons Cher Belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame” which was published last December during the Christmas album bruhaha and I completely missed it. To be honest, I got kind of tired of these rock-and-roll hall of fame crusades. And since this article was written, (maybe because this was written), Cher was finally included to the 2024 induction list.

And really this isn’t about a hall of fame. This is about Cher’s legitimacy and credibility in music. That’s what I’ve always been blathering on about. Cher fans are always concerned about her credibility in ways other fans of other artists (working in more respected genres) are not. So I really appreciate this article and I would like to talk about its points because they are the very markers of coolness and legitimacy in rock music.

Grein already points out that the HoF itself has broadened into many sub-genres, like R&B, rap, country. “If ABBA, Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston and Dolly Parton are in, what’s the rationale for leaving Cher out?” And here I’d like us to keep focus on the “keeping out” from the idea of legitimacy and credibility every time Grein mentions the HoF, because that is just what a hall of fame sanctions, a pre-existing status of credibility and legitimacy.

Grein pretty much follows the trail of rock legitimacy I’ve been tracking over the last umpteen years. What makes a person worthy of respect in music: is it record sales, is it concert tickets, is it loyal fans (or should we say the more male-coded aficionados?), is it years aboard the show biz, is it good critical reviews, is it influence, is it innovation, is it a stance or posture, did she help define an era or genre?

And…

Yes, She Helped Define an Era or Genre

Sonny & Cher helped define the mid-60s folk-rock and pop-rock era. Grein notes that Sonny wrote three “fine songs” with “I Got You Babe,” “Baby Don’t Go” and “The Beat Goes On.” I would add “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” to that list and call them strong songs of that era. Grein concedes that S&C were more pop-sounding than The Byrds (or the Mamas and the Papas, I would add), but that “their sound and look” helped define that era.

I would add that any thought of the summer of 1965 necessarily includes Cher singing “I Got You Babe.”

As a subset of this, Cher “was one of the first artists to have a big hit with a Bob Dylan song.” Her version (at #15) trounced the Byrds version at #40). Cher’s hit Bob Dylan song even preceded Dylan’s own first hit by a week (“Like a Rolling Stone”).

Yes, She Defines Rock and Roll Attitude

Grein says Cher has proven to be a risk taker. She gave up a lucrative Vegas career to become an actress. He says the HoF’s focus seems to be a youthful “rule-breaking attitude and spirit.” Grein says Cher telling the HoF to go fuck themselves on National TV was “a pretty rock and roll thing to do.” Grein also notes that, like Willie Nelson, “Cher exhibited an IDGAF attitude long before anyone had coined that acronym.”

Grein calls Cher’s Oscar dress of 1986 “one of the greatest sight-gags in Oscar history.” It was also a f*ck-you to the Academy for their snobbery around her performance outfits, boyfriends and prior status as a music and television star.

Cher: not afraid to say F*ck You.

Yes, She Has Many Hit Records Spanning a Record-Breaking Period of Time

All while multi-talking. “One month before she won the Oscar,” Grein says, “she had a top 10 hit with the rock ballad ‘ Found Someone.’ The very week she won the Oscar, she entered the Hot 100 with the follow-up hit, ‘We All Sleep Alone,’ co-written by Rock Hall members Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora.”

Her albums, Grein says, span53 years from Sonny & Cher’s Look at Us in 1965 to her Christmas album of 2023. Her No. 1 singles on Billboard Hot 100 span 34 years from “I Got You Babe” in 1965 to “Believe” in 1999.  Grein also points out that her Grammy for “Believe” spanned 34 years after Sonny & Cher were nominated for best new artist.

Yes, She Has Killed It In Concert Tours

“Cher was among the first female artist to undertake a massively successful solo tour.” She has headlined “seven major concert tours” including her farewell tour which “was one of the top 10 highest-grossing  tours of that decade….For the first half of the decade, it was second only to The Rolling Stones’ Licks Tour in total grosses.” At that time it was “the most successful tour ever undertaken by a female headliner. The 236-date tour finally ended in 2005 after having played to more than 3.5 million fans and earning more than $250 million.”

The TV special of that tour earned Cher a Primetime Emmy, joining “an impressive array of women who have won in that category for one-woman concert specials” including Liza Minnelli, Barbra Streisand and Adele.

Yes, She Has Had and Impactful Influence

Grein also talks about the artists Cher either paved the way for or artists who cite her as an influence: Madonna (the aesthetics of shock), Miley Cyrus, Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Gwen Stefani, Taylor Swift (there’s a Cher quote on the wall that begins the great song, “You Need to Calm Down.“), Cyndi Lauper, Little Big Town, Adam Lambert, P!nk. Tracy Chapman and Chrissie Hynde (who re-recorded “I Got You Babe”) have cited Cher in interviews as well.

Grein quotes Shon Faye to say, “If Madonna and Lady Gaga and Kylie [Minogue] and Cyndi Lauper were playing football, Cher would be the stadium they played on, and the sun that shone down on them.”

Yes, Cher Has Had the Harshest, Meanest Critics but Some Great Critics, Too

As I wrote in 2020, Cher escaped bad reviews from famously harsh reviewers Lester Bangs and John Mendelsohn (who some claimed would have given God a bad review).

Lester Bangs reviewing All I Ever Need Is You in 1972:

John & Yoko. Grace & Paul. Paul & Linda. Sonny & Cher had the formula down years before any of those melodious romances hit the stage and were a hell of a lot more appealing too., although that may not be particularly significant—the same thing could be said for Louis Prima and Keely Smith. And let us not forget Paul and Paula. The reason that Sonny & Cher are so much nicer to think about than the aforementioned crew of dilettantes, barterers and their wives is that Sonny & Cher don’t put on the same kind of airs.  How you feel about them at this point pretty much depends on how you feel about showbiz in general. If you think that Johnny Carson is a honk and the Copa just a hangout for alcoholics, if you cannot abide the sigh of black ties and/or tiaras between you and your artist-heroes, then you probably don’t like Sonny & Cher; I have seen reviews of their recent albums by earnest 17-year old rock critics lambasting the devoted duo entirely in terms of “us” versus “them.” And at the recent MCA convention in Burbank, when Sonny & Cher played a long, slick supperclub set climaxing with their eight-minute histrionic orgy on “Hey Jude,” I observed people all around me set their faces in that grimace they never pulled out for bluejeaned mediocrities. And those that thought themselves too hip for this schmaltz would make remarks later about the “tastelessness” of it. Why? Because Cher tells Sonny she’s not gonna ball him after the show, and drops innuendos about the size of his dong? Well, I’ll settle for Sonny & Cher being just blue enough for them poor old farts and fraus in the belly of the beast, because I like slick supperclub music, I like glittery Las Vegas-style entertainment without one iota of artistic aspiration. I’ll even put on a tie. Maybe I’m just getting old but I would rather see Sonny & Cher with a bourbon and water in front of me anytime than squat sweating in another concert hall while another rock group runs through amplified oatmeal highlights from the last big album it took them eight months of overdubs to produce.

John Mendelsohn reviewing Sonny & Cher Live in 1972:

Granted that they’ve gone through some heavy changes since they practically single-handedly insinuated folk-rock into the American musical consciousness, 

….what Sonny & Cher’s detractors always fail to mention is that the couple have matured into such sensitive interpreters that they can transform even the most over familiar material into searingly soulful expressions, as witness Cher’s fiery treatment of “Danny Boy.” Truly Cher has developed into one of our most inspiring ladies of song, capable of evoking emotions that not even a Nancy Sinatra or Marcia Strassman can deal with without some evidence of strain..

Grein lists some other great Cher reviews I had never seen before. like Rob Sheffield from Rolling Stone in 2019:

…there are no other careers remotely like hers, [particularly] in the history of pop music” and he referred to Cher as “the one-woman embodiment of the whole gaudy story of pop music.”

James Reed from The Boston Globe in 2014:

Along with David Bowie, she is one of the original chameleons in pop music, constantly in flux and challenging our perceptions of her.”

Joe Lynch in Billboard from 2017:

It seems odd to say anyone as famous as Cher is under-appreciated: the woman has five No. 1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100, an Oscar for best actress and has remained a household name for half a century. even so, Cher’s impact as a musical force is unfairly disregarded or minimized…Years before David Bowie toyed with gender-bending, Cher brought her deep contralto voice to the top of the Billboard Hot 100…

James Dunn in Rolling Stone in 1996:

Cher is the coolest woman who ever stood in shoes. Why? Because her motto is, ‘I don’t give a shit what you think, I’m going to wear this multicolored wig.”

Alec Mapa in The Advocate from 2003:

Cher embodies an unapologetic freedom and fearlessness that some of us can only aspire to.

It just occurred to me all of the above are men. Some of the womens in rock criticism need to say something methinks. Besides me.

As Grein points out, right now the HoF is 25% women. If there are only 25% of women in rock music right now, that would be a fair amount. How many women are there in rock music since the dawn of rock and roll? Someone else please do the math.

Yes, She Is An Innovator

Like or despise auto-tune, it had a huge impact on Rap music. She also innovated many rock and roll “looks” including popularizing bell bottoms, long straight hair (she had girls using irons on their hair!) and inspiring the term “Giving Cher” for innovating the biggest kind of iconic attitude.

In fact, in fashion Cher is both an influencer and an innovator. With Bob Mackie, she invented the scene-stealing red-carpet look. Grein says that her Met Gala dress from 1974 is still being imitated “40 years later.”

And Bonus Yes, She Loyally Supports the Cause

Grein also says she “brought a rock sensibility to prime-time” television all through the 1970s variety series solos numbers and guest spots. This, he feels, (as does Cher scholar Robrt Pela), was Cher’s “biggest hurdle to being taken seriously…the smash success” of those shows. The shows “gave airtime to a lot of rock artists.” He mentions this includes Linda Ronstadt, Ike & Tina Turner, David Bowie (in his U.S. television debut), The Jackson 5 and Patti Labelle (among many others: The Spinners, The Supremes, Fanny, early Rick Springfield and Elton John). The shows also showcased original rock and roll artists in tribute shows, including Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis,

And most of all, Cher has been loyal to Sonny, (even after he tricked her out of a decade of earnings). Years of fake-snipping aside, years of mutual-real-snipping aside. Cher time and time again has given Sonny his due (as well as fair criticism, most recently calling him truthfully, “a mixed bag.”) She has tried to support their legacy together, despite the lack of respect he continues to receive (disrespect even), and there is not a thing more rock and roll than that.

Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion

I was very fortunate to be able able to attend the premiere showing of the documentary Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion in Los Angeles on May 13 with my friends Julie and Dave. When Julie sent me the email about the lineup of the after-movie discussion panel, I thought this is my dream panel! It’s got Cher, to begin with, and Bob Mackie and Carol Burnett (who, if I had a life to live over again…I would try to be a Carol Burnett) and Ru Paul (who is one of my previously claimed spirit animals!). Pink! was not advertised to attend (see below) but showed up as a nice surprise.

Here are some news reports on the red carpet of the event:

…and some press shots of the red carpet. Cher arrived in the “We All Sleep Alone” outfit from the 1999 Believe Tour (without the pirate hat and with a new cool sash belt). She didn’t keep this outfit on for the Q&A. This was just the red-carpet-fit.

The movie began with director Matthew Miele talking about Bob Mackie’s optimism, his spectacle and glamour and how all the real stars wore Back Mackie.  I don’t remember who said it but someone added that the biggest stars wore Mackie because he “made them look like the superstars they were.”

The movie made the differentiation between other fashion houses and what Bob Mackie does, which is performance clothing. Mackie does not design for the spring line, haute couture or everyday wear. He builds a character for performers and outfits. He “picks up on somebody’s essence” in order to help them “project who they are in [performing] moments.” He does it for live shows; he did it when creating costumes for skits on variety shows, solo numbers or for characters in musicals and movies.

Law Roach commented that “every superhero has a costume” and many of the contributors talked about the psychology of the outfit and the confidence that arises when you wear certain clothes.

Carol Burnett first came to Bob Mackie through admiration of the Mitzi Gaynor, “Let’s Go” outfit. Gaynor herself talked about that outfit’s “brilliant construction.” How it moved.

Miele said something interesting that I feel matches my own experience, that your taste for beauty is formed in your childhood and early adolescence. He said his love of visual beauty came from variety shows like Cher’s shows. RuPaul quips, “Let’s face it…Cher!” He called her a gorgeous creature. The documentary talked about Mackie and Cher being family at this point and how they “are both shy but express themselves as larger than life.”

Mackie himself noted Cher’s charisma, how he was fascinated with her from the beginning and how she inhabits clothes like jeans, with a casual flair. Cher said Macke could create “what my personality feels like.”

Vicky Lawrence noted that during Cher’s big number, all the Carol Burnett show cast would run over through the ladies bathroom at CBS (the big studio doors were closed) to see what Cher was wearing. Cher said her life changed when Bob came into it. They pushed each other.

You can see how this confidence-through-clothing might have changed Cher in the early 1970s, along with the storylines of empowered women in the writing of the variety show skits, how those two things could be of-a-piece.

They talked about Cher’s 58th Academy Awards gown. Mackie noted that Cher was playing “down and dirty characters” at that time and “people hadn’t seen her dress up in a while.” They talked about how that outfit was assembled between the two of them, Mackie and Cher. Mackie admits people were horrified [by the outfit], “That’s not fashion!” But Cher insists “He makes art. Costuming is art.”

Mackie was often called, a bit disparagingly the “King of Camp” for his “ta da,” his humor and razzle dazzle. Bernadette Peters notes that many haute couture designers have been forced to admit, “we’ve been stealing from you for years.” The head of CFDA (Council of Fashion Designers of America) also admitted, “fashion is snobby” and Mackie was seen as “a showman,” as not having the appropriate level of taste. Reviews have changed, however, because “Time tells the truth.”

The movie covers Mackie’s inspirations, his early work with Judy Garland, his connection to the Marilyn Monroe birthday dress, his love of “costumes that appeal to you emotionally.” While the progresses, we see how Cher’s blue ABBA dress was drawn and assembled at the helm of an Armenian woman named Elizabeth (who’s last name I did not catch). Elizabeth gets a lot of screen time and Mackie calls her his hero. She says, “He’s the only one.” She doesn’t intend to offend all her other designers she works with “but they know,” she says. She means Mackie does it old-school, hand-beaded and sewn, no factories. His is detail oriented and precise. The director prompts Elizabeth to say all the women behind the beautiful outfits…” and she answers, “are Armenian.” (This includes the women who sew the dresses and, of course, the woman who wears them so famously.

By the way, seeing the Cher and Tina duets on the big screen was fabulous. It was fabulous! Seeing the documentary in a theater is worth it for that alone.

George Schlatter says these women were not just singers, actors and dancers. “These women are events. Cher, Judy, Carol.”

Mackie, Burnett figured, made 17,000 costumes for The Carol Burnett Show over 11 years, an average of 65 per week. She remarked about how versatile he was, how he helped shaped the characters and comedy, the best example being the Gone with the Wind skit’s big moment.

Here and in other recent interviews, Burnett has been talking about the Miss Wiggins outfit. Here is another example of Mackie’s genius. Burnett says Tim Conway originally designed the character of Miss Wiggins as a dotty old lady. Mackie insisted the show had been doing too many of those old ladies lately and he designed a ditzy blonde secretary outfit instead. Burnett complained that her butt wasn’t big enough to fill out the skirt and Mackie instructed her to stick her butt back into the skirt. Burnett says the character came to her at that moment when she had to learn to walk with her butt projecting back into the skirt.

To me this is brilliant because the design was basically broken. Mackie designed an outfit that didn’t fit, all to create a character. It’s amazing and it reminds me of the fruits of failure, how many amazing things can happen when wrong turns are taken. Seeking perfection sometimes is misguided.

They movie ends with a discussion of Cher’s infamous “Turn Back Time” video outfit, alternatively called “vulgar” (by Mackie), and disparagingly called a duct-tape outfit and basically a seat belt.

I’ve read a few books about Mackie, including Unmistakable Mackie: The Fashion and the Fantasy of Bob Mackie by Frank DeCarlo and The Art of Bob Mackie by Frank Vlastnik and Laura Ross, (which Burnett and Cher both contributed forwards and afterwards to). But this documentary, five years in the making, digs deeper into Mackie’s childhood, his relationship with his parents, his relationship with his ex-wife, his coming out and the tragic loss of his son. We also meet his grandchildren. This is a much more personal account of his life.

There’s no trailer out yet but here’s an extended clip of part of Cher’s interview from the movie.

After the movie, it was time for the Q&A. A big one it would be, too. Cher was very charming when she came out and seemed very happy to be there.

The lineup included, starting from the left, Joe McFate, Mackie’s longtime Director of Design, Ru Paul,  Carol Burnett, Bob Mackie, Cher Pink! and the director, Matthew Miele. The moderator to the far right is Dave Karger.

Cher talked about “trying to build a character like Edith Bunker” using Lucille Ball hair and a leopard leotard. This turned out to the Laverne character. She said Mackie “helped you make your character complete.”

RuPaul talked about Mackie’s “hutzpah” and that he is the “benchmark in splash.” Pink! said if she was wearing Bob Mackie, “I’m gonna win!”

Asked what the common denominator of all the women on the panel, Mackie said they were all open to looking terrible and that they were comfortable in his clothes. They could “pull it off.” Mackie called Carol Burnett “the quickest changer I’ve ever met.”

Cher referenced the First Nine Months Are The Hardest special as her first time meeting Mackie but he corrected her to say that it was the Sonny & Cher appearance on the Carol Burnett show. Probably this 1967 one. Cher defended herself by joking, “Well, in my world where I live…”

Mackie said at the time he was expecting a “hulking goth girl” from what he saw of Cher on music TV shows like Hullabaloo. Cher appeared instead to him “like Audrey Hepburn on vacation. This is gonna be better than I thought.”

Miele emphasizes that Bob Mackie draws all the patterns. There’s no factory and that what he does is a dying art.

Cher talks about how grateful she is to be living her childhood dream like what Bob Mackie describes in the documentary and that at five years of age she was singing into a hairbrush. [How high tech. I was singing into a jump rope.]

Pink! talked about the wear and tear performance outfits take and how they need to accommodate the wireless mic packs that are very hard to hide, how at the end of shows she’s out there picking up beads from the stage.

Carol Burnett, Cher and Bob Mackie seemed genuinely mutual fans of each other. Ru Paul was pretty low key, not talking much. Pink! seemed thrilled to be there.

There is no word yet on release date. It looks like no distribution deal has been reached yet.

Compilation of some Cher moments.

Cher At Large

Fashion

Cher attended Fashion Week in Paris again this year with Alexander Edwards and it looks like “things” are back on. The week produced some beautiful pictures and happy-looking pictures of Cher.

Life

Then there was the big scandal uncovered in the released divorce documents between Marieangela King and Cher’s son Elijah Allman. The news sources online went batsh*t that day. I’m always uncomfortable commenting on Cher-family news, those private details we only know because Cher is world-famous.

And yet it is those personal stories that are the most poignant of any memoir or life story, those human moments that go beyond the journal of work experiences. And actually, this was what made the stage show The Cher Show meaningful I felt, the key idea being that Cher is not fearless (as we everyone might believe). She is, rather, a person full of fear and the show explores how she navigates in that space of fear. It’s beyond any movie, song or personal appearance, and yet it’s also about all that, too.

On Stage

Speaking of which, the stage show has finally hit the road with a list of shows coming to a town near you (except not a town near me because apparently most touring companies, like most Americans, consider New Mexico to be a foreign country). I would love to go see the show again but I’m not sure I will be able to make a show trip happen any time soon.

Peruse the touring schedule and watch a video excerpt: https://thechershowtour.com/

Even though the pre-Covid touring show was planning to hit the University of New Mexico’s Popejoy Hall in Albuquerque, this new tour seems to be playing smaller venues with a new cast. Oddly, there’s no update or mention of this show from the main Broadway page, https://thechershowbroadway.com/, which still lists a 2021 tour coming soon.

Music

The new single was released for the Christmas album and there are some good reviews.

from Attitude:

“to be as daringly un-Christmassy as possible. Save for some subtle sleigh bells here and there, that is. And you know what? It’s refreshing.

This is a cut-glass powerhouse pop-dance banger that would work just as well in the height of summer at a beach party, or year-round at circuit parties. Fire will be blasting it through the speakers come Christmas Eve, that’s for sure, and maybe through to Boxing Day.

After so many desperate attempts by modern artists to tap into the commercial viability of Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ – when even Chris Brown is dropping cringe-inducing festive fare, you know all bets are off – Cher outshines them all with this cool, chill cut from upcoming album Christmas, which the icon promises is “not your mother’s Christmas album.” We don’t doubt it. Just call her Mother Christmas!”

The Rolling Stone review posted the track list: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/cher-holiday-album-single-dj-play-a-christmas-song-1234847962/

“DJ Play a Christmas Song” is the first record listed on the track list, which boasts guest appearances from Stevie Wonder, Darlene Love, Michael Bublé, Tyga, and Cyndi Lauper. The 13-track album features four original singles and new interpretations of “Santa Baby,” “Run Rudolph Run,” and “Please Come Home For Christmas.” Helmed by producer Mark Taylor, the album recreates Wonder’s “What Christmas Means to Me” and Bublé’s “Home. This meant she would entertain the thought of updating classics, but would also recruit Tyga to rap on “Drop Top Sleigh Ride” and drop it on the tracklist right next to the Bublé cut. Sarah Hudson — a pop songwriter with credits on records from Dua Lipa, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, and more — helmed that unexpected collaboration, as well as “DJ Play a Christmas Song” and “Angels in the Snow.” 

Billboard also did an article about the album: https://www.billboard.com/music/pop/cher-talks-first-holiday-album-christmas-1235435413/

And the wikipedia page also lists the tracks and other basic info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_(Cher_album)

The Pink News https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/10/06/cher-releases-festive-single-dj-play-a-christmas-song-and-the-reviews-are-in-top-tier/

Initial fan Tweets: https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/10/06/cher-releases-festive-single-dj-play-a-christmas-song-and-the-reviews-are-in-top-tier/

Cher Universe is also tweeting about how the downloads and presales are faring around the world: https://twitter.com/TCherUniverse

The Cher-effect is definitely already present in song one, but interesting Cher’s voice gets clearer as the song progresses. Voice manipulation will continue to be controversial. And I continue to evaluate my own feelings around it. I’m never excited to hear it. All my favorite singers have voices I like for their organic qualities. Whatever values they have, those voices are solidly themselves. I do not want to hear, for example, Barry Manilow’s voice put through a vocoder. Well, maybe for a minute, just for chuckle.

But the point is, Cher doesn’t like her natural voice. So shouldn’t she be afforded the artistic license to use it as a material to manipulate like, for example, clay or paint? What I don’t like personally, I do defend intellectually. And at this point if you criticize Cher for using voice manipulation, she’ll give you the middle finger. Which is what we have here, in a nutshell, as a Christmas song. And that’s just as badass really as having the reputation for hiring four hitmen to rescue the son of Gregg Allman from a British pop singer.

There are four new songs by Sarah Hudson (who turns out to be the daughter or Mark Hudson from The Hudson Brothers) including the dance track. Billboard describes another one of her contributions, “I Like Christmas” as bluesy. Also on the album are 3 1960s-era R&B/Soul songs, 1 1950s-era rock-n-roll classic, 2 pop songs, a big-band jazz song, 1 rap and 2 country songs. Pretty good spread.

  1.  “DJ Play a Christmas Song” – new song
  2. “What Christmas Means to Me” (duet with Stevie Wonder)
    This Motown Christmas staple popularized by Stevie Wonder in 1967. The original b-side of the record was “Bedtime for Toys.” One 3 occasions on this album Cher revisits originals with their artist of note, which is a nice way to express her respect for these songs.
  3.  “Run Rudolph Run”
    According to Wikipedia, this 1958 hit was “written by Chuck Berry but credited to Johnny Marks and M. Brodie due to Marks’ trademark on the character of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Oh boo. The b-side was “Merry Christmas Baby.” You may remember the Bryan Adams version if you are a child of the 80s and had that first red “A Very Special Christmas” album with the Keith Haring cover.
  4. “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” (duet with Darlene Love)
    The nice thing about this duet with Darlene Love is that Cher and Love worked on this Greenwich-Barry-Spector-penned song together back in 1963 (Cher singing background vocals) on the Phil Spector Christmas album, “A Christmas Gift for You” where the song originally appeared. It wasn’t technically a single but the song has become one of the most popular Christmas songs of all time. Darlene Love reports that she and Cher were very excited to re-record it together again. And Darlene Love doesn’t get nearly enough popular attention for her amazing vocals nowadays, so it’s significant that she’s on this album getting some spotlight.
  5. “Angels in the Snow” – a new song
  6. “Home” (duet with Michael Bublé’)
    This is an unlikely choice, Michael Bublé’s 2005 single “Home.”
  7. “Drop Top Sleigh Ride” (duet with Tyga) – a new song
  8. “Please Come Home for Christmas”
    “Please Come Home for Christmas” was a 1960 Charles Brown hit, later re-done very memorably in 1978 by the Eagles (a favorite band of Cher and so this technically adds to her covers of Eagles songs). The b-side of the Brown hit was the awfully parenthetical “Christmas (Comes Once a Year)”… but it starts in October so…
  9. “I Like Christmas” – a new song
  10. “Christmas Ain’t Christmas Without You”
    This song is not yet linked on Cher’s “Christmas” album Wikipedia page so its provenance is a bit mysterious. It might be from the 1965 “Christmas with Buck Owens and his Buckaroos” album, although the song, co-written by Owens, is technically “Christmas Aint Christmas Dear Without You” on that album which also contains the charmer “Santa Looked a Lot Like Daddy” and “Santa’s Gonna Come on a Stagecoach” which unfortunately sounds more interesting than it is.
  11. “Santa Baby”
    This big-band/jazz smash by Eartha Kitt with Henri René and His Orchestra from 1953 was also covered by Madonna on that first 80s “A Very Special Christmas” album. I hope Cher takes it in another, less baby-doll direction.
  12. “Put a Little Holiday in Your Heart” (duet with Cyndi Lauper)
    Cyndi Lauper and Cher sing this country song together, one of the songs LeAnn Rimes performed on her 1997 ABC movie “Holiday in Your Heart” about Rimes (playing herself) “preparing to make her debut at the Grand Ole Opry at Christmas” (Wikipedia). I liked Cyndi Lauper’s 2015 country album, “Detour” so I’m looking forward to this duet. Plus those two have great chemistry with each other.
  13. “This Will Be Our Year”
    This is the track that gets me all verklempt. This Zombies song was not even a single from their 1968 Odessey and Oracle album. I started the year with this song; it my New Year’s Day Tweet. And I grew quite attached to it during the year. That Cher closes her Christmas album with it and thus my year will end with it…well, that’s really quite moving. ❤️

I forgot to mention this but back in January, Cher and Eric Esralian published an Op Ed in Newsweek about Armenia: https://www.newsweek.com/you-cannot-erase-us-opinion-1776282

Cher Shows Completed

Fashionweek2022Cher just made a big splash (or two) at Fashion Week in Paris:

Rolling Stone
The Guardian
People

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I’ve been keeping my nose in projects lately. On top of that, ICANN had a meeting in Kuala Lumpur so it was the nightshift for me last week. And now cleaning furiously for a visit next week from my friend Natalie (the real Lion in this story) is visiting and we’re taking a scenic train trip on the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic from Colorado to Chama, New Mexico. We’ve been trying to plan this trip since Covid started. Sigh.

And I’ve been continuing to work diligently documenting Cher TV shows. Recently I finished the tour through the solo show. As part of that I watched the Bob Mackie interview in the Cher TimeLife DVD set. Here's a summary of that:

Mackie said he started working with Cher when she would ask for him whenever Sonny & Cher did early 1970s TV specials and Cher liked working with him because he was young. She was intimidated by old people in show biz, Mackie said. “I’ll never be older than 30,” she told him. “I’d be old then.” Mackie added, “look as us now.” Turns out death is kind of more intimidating that old age.

Anyway, Mackie says he saw S&C as a novelty group back then and that after the Beatles arrived they weren’t really getting booked anymore so they transitioned to a nightclub act.

He acknowledges Sonny & Cher were the same height, but that Cher had “a tall look.” He said for the first season of their variety show the network gave them no money and so Mackie had to recycle Carol Burnett dresses (they are the same size and measurements) and keep using the same basic white dress made over with embellishments. He said Cher always looked better than the models in his clothes. He said Sonny and Cher had a good PR agent and Cher was getting a lot of magazine covers.

Mackie says he was there for the first variety show planning session and he remembers the writers didn’t really know what to do with Cher. Was she like Keely Smith? No. Mackie could see Cher had something nobody else had. “She looks like nobody in show business.” Was she American Indian, Middle Eastern, Hispanic? He reiterates that he thinks her armpits are her best feature. He said she had a nice “soft six pack.” He said once the censors saw the show’s huge ratings, they relented on the belly button thing.

Mackie says they were always running late and pulling all-nighters on sewing outfits. Dresses would be hand-beaded and take hundreds of hours to finish. Cher was always very happy with bugle beads, crystals, feathers and rhinestones. Mackie’s favorite dress was the Time Magazine/Met Gala dress. “It looked like you could see something but you couldn’t.”

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He says Cher outfits have been experiencing Internet nostalgia recently and he sees copies of his dresses on young celebrities and drag queens everywhere.

He says their outfits were never vulgar, never trying too hard. Cher was “never posey” and could rock a t-shirt and jeans as easily as a historical costume dress. He said she was fearless with outfits and unlike other glamour girls wasn’t afraid to look silly. He said Cher was really laid back and easy and full of energy.

As we know, Mackie was doing the full suite of costumes for The Carol Burnett Show and only had the bandwidth to do Cher’s outfits on all her variety shows. Ret Turner took over, working with Mackie, on the rest of the cast including Sonny and Chastity. Turner and Mackie had worked together on lots of shows, Mackie said.

Of the Tina Turner, Kate Smith, Cher Beatles medley, Mackie says, “you will never see that again” and “you have to see it to believe it.”

He says the Laverne character is the complete opposite of Cher. He says he worked with Teri Garr earlier when she was a dancer on Hullabaloo. He said the 1970s was the Golden Age of Variety (which surprised all of us, Mackie said, “because we thought were at the end of the road.”) But never again would networks spend that kind of money on a big orchestra, couture-level costumes, sets and all-around glamour.

Mackie said in the recent Broadway show think-tank sessions Cher’s likeability kept coming up as a phenomenon. Cher wins you over, Mackie says, and people have an “odd fascination” with her. People “always wanted to know what Cher was doing.” He said it was “tough for the girls playing her. Nobody’s quite like her.”

ChershowI really enjoyed re-evaluating the Cher episodes in chronological order this year and I came to have more respect for what the show was doing: more overt feminism, trying to present Cher in her own right, a stronger focus on musical guests. There were a few cringy moments but there were just as many, if not more, really fabulous, history-making moments the show doesn’t get nearly enough credit for. It’s the show I was probably the least familiar with going into the project, having never seen any episodes before VH-1 re-aired some in the 1990s. I definitely could see a continuation of the cultural work the Comedy Hour was doing but with a bigger bang.

In some sense, the next incarnation of the Cher TV with Sonny would seem like a regression. But it wasn’t. After sweating it out on her solo show, Cher could now hold her own side-by-side with Sonny and it shows.

And any tension underscoring their post-divorce reunion may have turned America off (as the show’s ratings didn’t stay high), but looking back the show was nonetheless interesting in some entirely new ways.

New-Old Cher Releases, Sonny Bono Dinner Party, Cher in Vogue 1971

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Re-Releases!

First things first, Cher has been rereleasing her classic 70s-era Warner Bros. remastered on her YouTube channel. First Stars was released a few weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/c/cher/videos

Today her channel announced that I'd Rather Believe in You will be next, coming out in August: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQc8H3CgeD8

This is happy news for fans who, although stocked with bootlegs, have been pestering for an official release for over two decades. The remastered Stars sounds pristine and hopefully the albums will someday be available on other streaming platforms or in physical form (with some scholarly words of perspective). Very happy July surprise!

In other music news, the single copy of the Wu-Tang Clan album with the Cher vocals on two songs, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, has been sold by the feds. Follow the story here. The second buyer paid millions once again and their identity will possibly be revealed in a few months. The Wu-Tang Clan wishes that the album be played only in small groups for 88 years from the date it was first sold to the nefarious Pharma Bro back in 2015, which means most of us will not live long enough to hear it. That is unless the resale contract was interrupted by federal confiscation. 

Sonny Bono Dinner Party

July has proven to be busy for Cher Scholar. I've started listening to KCRW again (lots of great stuff I’ve missed over the last five years I’ve been away) and I've thrown three small parties in as many weeks, and learned how to use my new braille machine.

For my upcoming birthday I received some meditation/introspection playing cards from a friend and the first one had the question: What makes you weird? I have a million answers to this but the one that pertains here is the fact that last Saturday I threw a Sonny Bono Recipe dinner party. And what's even more weird is the fact that it's not the first one I've thrown. I did it once before when I was 12 years old as a last-hurrah to my Sonny & Cher fandom, right before I decided it would be somewhat less weird in the 1980s to go solo with Cher. 

But last Saturday I invited my friends Priscilla and Mikaela over and they were gamely willing to test out a few of these Sonny  recipes. Mikaela also came over to teach me how to use my new braille machine. The fact that I just bought a braille machine is also a little bit weird. 

I made the recipe for Sonny Bono's Spaghetti with Fresh Tomato Sauce from The Dead Celebrity Cookbook by Frank DeCarlo.

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Mr. Cher Scholar made Sonny Bono's Pollo Bono from the Baltimore Sun.

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He made a vegetarian, fake-chicken version for me.

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Cheap table wine: check. Everyone liked the results. The biggest critique came from me, which was to say the fake chicken was rubbery (but very tasty). Mikaela said the chicken was "fantastic, excellent" and she loved the spaghetti too. She said she especially loved watching the video I showed them before dinner of Sonny & Cher cooking on The Mike Douglas Show (thanks to Cher scholar Jay for that). Priscilla said she loved the Pollo Bono too and is usually very picky about her chicken.

Mr. Cher Scholar said, "I like his recipes because they’re authentic stuff made at home, not over-the-top elaborate. Simple ingredients. Simple process." Afterwards he said he would make it again for his brother. "It's not hard."

Alterations: Our chicken breasts were huge. Monstrous. So he ending up baking them for 50 minutes at 375 degrees. 

IMG_20210724_205749Spinning up the braille machine wasn’t so easy. Mikaela works at a school for the blind and she was able to bring me some braille guides. She showed me the basic concepts of the braille “alphabet.” We had a paper-loading issue which was solved by my googling "braille paper-loading issue" and getting the result "How do I load paper into the ^*#! brailler?"

Then we had an issue with the carriage return that caused us to take the whole machine apart, which Priscilla did with our drill. We all then looked at inside and provided speculative theories about the problem. Mr. Cher Scholar saw some "teeth" inside which needed to catch the return. He adjusted the margins and then it worked.

He usually avoids fixing stuff like an allergy so I asked him later what inspired him to do that and he said it was working with a manual typewriter all those years as a show-biz writer. So this was a real four-person team effort.

Then Mikaela taught me how to use the braille keys! Which are very cool and insanely complicated at the same time. I have to practice, she says, before I start typing out poems on the thing.

Perfect Pork Chops (Correction)

Another early birthday present I received yesterday was Celebrity Recipes, a newsstand publication from the 1980s judging by the big Heather Locklear, Linda Evans and Michael Douglas pictures on its cover. Anyway, on page 32 it claims that Perfect Pork Chop (the recipe I also have from Singers & Swingers in the Kitchen, The Scene-Makers Cook Book by Roberta Ashley) is actually Cher's recipe. 

Cher in Vogue

IMG_20210729_104538The following spread is from Vogue, September 1, 1971. This was the same year their first live album came out. while they were still on the nightclub circuit. 

Their live album cover is unusual in that the gatefold only shows a large photo of Sonny & Cher facing each other, a kind of extravagant gesture for a gatefold of recording artists on the skids. The photos are also very shadowy and almost abstract, especially the front cover.

Coverlive

 

 

So it's good to see another shot of Cher in the album outfit and have it described by the scribes of Vogue magazine.

Cher, Elizabeth Taylor and Helen Hardin

IMG_20210315_193844 Notice the caption in the image to the left ("anticipates Cher") from an Elizabeth Taylor biography. 

I'm doing a poetry/story HTML project right now for a class on Digital Literature and I needed to beef up on the subject of Elizabeth Taylor for it. I was never a huge fan because (a) this was my mother's era and (b) Taylor was on somewhat of downward slide when I first learned about her in the late 1970s. But I've gained a lot of respect for both Taylor and Richard Burton since reading more about them.

CleolikeSo it's come as a bit of surprise to see some natural parallels between Cher and Elizabeth Taylor, especially considering Cher doesn't call out Taylor as a major inspiration like she does Audrey Hepburn and Katharine Hepburn, aside from the obvious references to the movie Cleopatra: Cher's eyeliner methods and Sonny & Cher first calling themselves Caesar and Cleo.

But there are a few other connections I:

  1. Elizabeth Taylor loved to make big entrances in shows and in life. Many times in books, people mention her "big entrances." This might go back to the biggest entrance of all in Cleopatra.

  2. She pushed some fashion envelopes. See above. The big headdress screamed Cher when I saw it in one book. The second book I picked up even calls it out. 2.b Costume Changes: apparently Taylor broke a record for most costume changes in a movie with Cleopatra, a record eventually broken by Julie Andrews.
  3. Elizabeth Taylor embraced the good and the bad about being famous and was able to cope with it. Cher often expresses the same kind of ambivalence but not bitterness about having to deal with mobs and the wheels of show biz.

Cherliz
I didn't find a lot of Cher-Taylor mashups online but Cher did appear at Taylor's televised 68th birthday bash.  See the photo below of Taylor and Michael Jackson clapping to Cher's comments.

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And here's a link to a 60s-era photo of Sonny, Cher and Taylor

Interestingly, the tabloids were also trying to get rumors going about an affair between Cher and Richard Burton, which seems funny in retrospect.

Cherliz2

1714750Also, I finally came across this picture of artist Helen Hardin on the cover of New Mexico Magazine with her late 60s wings. This photo always reminds me of Cher's wings in 1968:

Wings

And in 1969:

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