Category: That’s The Obsession Talking (Page 1 of 5)

Forever Fitness of the Heart and Mind

November 3, 2025 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

Because I dug out Cher’s book Forever Fit recently for pasta sauce recipes, I decided to sit down last week to reread it. The last time I read it I was 21 years old (right when it came out) and I didn’t know nothin’ about nothin’ so I’m sure a lot of it (ok, all of it) went right over my head.

But I would like to say a few things about it now as it is probably the first really memoir-like thing Cher ever published outside of Sonny & Cher’s reality TV and video moments. And since it was at the end of her big movie spree, it has mostly stories about the 80s and where her head was at in the 80s, which I don’t want to get into yet because Cher hasn’t finished her “official” memoirs.

But I do want to talk about the book in context with all the other celebrity beauty books that came out in the 1980s. It was the golden-era of celebrity beauty self-help books and my St. Louis library shelves, Thornhill, were full of them.

Like the Susan Dey book we discussed last year, I was really into celebrity guidebooks when I was a teen in the 1980s. I was seeking mentors for adulthood and I poured over the instructions. Took notes even because that’s completely nerdy. I tried out all the products, advice and exercises and loved every minute of it. I think this is why I loved the Cher informercials so much. It’s like a self-help beauty demonstration come to life.

These are the books I mostly remember, Christie Brinkley’s Outdoor Beauty and Fitness Book (which I just reordered for a song on Thrift Books), Revlon’s Art of Beauty, The Raquel Welch Total Beauty and Fitness Program and (I forgot these once iconic, now forgotten) The Beauty Principal and The Body Principal by Victoria Principal.

The whole trend started with Jane Fonda’s Workout Book (which I also had and followed lazily), which was a real phenomenon and started a whole high-impact aerobics craze which unintendedly is now requiring copious amounts of boomers and Gen-Xers to have knee and hip replacement surgeries. These were coffee-table sized books, some paperback, some hardback. Linda Evans had one. There was one by Joan Collins and Cheryl Tiegs. Vogue had a few.

Brinkley even has a new one out called Timeless Beauty. And yes, I’ve today purchased a used copy of that, too. These beauty books were also exercises (punny!) in biography as they always had long preambles and lots of personal stories. Jane Fonda talked about her journey through bulimia for example. Cher talks about her history with diet and exercise too and that sometimes leads into stories about food on movie sets or skin care under television lights.

I purchased Raquel Welch’s book and tried to learn yoga from it. And Cher is right in Forever Fit when she says you need to see video of people doing the poses and exercises (or see them live and in person). Exercise, as Cher says, is not a recipe. To that very point, I found the Welch’s book indecipherable. You couldn’t tell which pictures where poses that flowed into other pictures or how long you were supposed to hold poses. It was so impossible to follow it felt mystical. But she looked great anyway.

I don’t know how well Forever Fit did commercially when it came out in 1991 because it just wasn’t like those other large-sized celebrity beauty books with lots of pictures of Cher applying her own makeup and eating healthy things and especially exercising. That would come later in the 1990s with her two workout videos. It was novel-sized and had very few photos at all, and those are just publicity stills of Cher to start off each chapter.

I read now that reviews were mixed at the time. Some liked the book’s comprehensive approach but Cher was always a target for plastic surgery, which she addresses in the book, and the ironic charge of inauthenticity, which has followed her all her career but has ultimately proven to be her core superpower and her kryptonite. She has always been unable to be anyone else but herself. So whatever.

More recent reviews call the book “old school” but that its advice stands the test of time….because it was based on science and not fads. For example, the book was already talking about the dangers of high-impact exercising.

But anyway, it’s so much more wordy than the other books were, which, at times, makes it feel like a slog when Robert Hass goes deep into body chemistry. Food science seems like frontier science, constantly evolving. So recent reviewers have noted some of the advice is dated. But the book wants you to understand food science so you won’t get caught up in the diet fads that come and go with eternal and predictable regularity. And for that, I think, the book has earned some lasting respect.

And as I’ve said earlier here, Cher never presents herself as the expert or guru. She always works alongside real experts who have helped her on her own journey.

So in some ways I found the impulse of this book more generous than the other beauty books (if also less fun) and less “be like me.” I had absolutely no way to be like the California sunshine of Christie Brinkley (who does that better?), even less than I had a way of becoming Cher. But I never had the sense Cher would want me to. In fact, the book implied being Cher wasn’t always a bed of roses.

It’s also interesting to me that there are no makeup tips in the book. None. Zero. And Cher has, since press for Burlesque, talked about her love of watching her mother and her mother’s friends put on makeup. In the memoir we find out she’s been doing her own makeup for much of her career and was as obsessed about it as makeup artist and friend Kevyn Aucoin. So that would maybe be something she would be an expert at, but we don’t get such tips from this book.

In any case, the impulse for this post isn’t about the beauty or exercise aspects of the book (which just reading it has gotten me once again off my bookish ass and onto my treadmill) or the biographical snapshots, both aspects that I want to delve into later sometime within a broader context.

What I really want to focus on now is how the book constantly makes connections between the mind and body. Cher constantly brings exercise back to her mental health, her situational and recurring anxiety and depression.

At the very end of the book, Cher starts talking about spirituality and trying to do one spiritual thing every day, how she does this with books, books-on-tape and meditations, all of which she brings with her on tour as part of her post-show, makeup-removing rituals. Talk of this bleeds into self-help and she gives a list of her self-help book recommendations:

Each Day a New Beginning: Daily Meditations for Women by Karen Casey (Hazelden Meditations)
Mediations for Women Who Do Too Much by by Anne Wilson Schaef (there’s now a journal version and one for men too by Jonathon Lazear with an introduction by Anne Wilson Schaef)
Healing the Child Within by Charles Whitfield (which, as Cher says, comes with a workbook)
The Road Less Traveled by Scott Peck (he’ll come back in again later)
Stranger in a Strange Land, the novel by Robert A. Heinlein (which I read in high school)
You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay
Love is Letting Go of Fear by Gerald G. Jampolsky
Codependent No More by Melody Beattie (This was one book in my little, remaining self-help stack, one of the excellent transforming books recommended by my own L.A. therapist and years later I loaned my underlined copy to a colleague at IAIA in Santa Fe and her boyfriend ripped it apart in a violent rage of anti-self-help-books, she said, and so she couldn’t return it to me; and that was a few weeks before the historic 100-year restraining order of Santa Fe.)

So I decided to try one of these, Healing the Child Within, because Cher says this is one of the best books she’s ever read and because it comes with a workbook which is like luring nerd-crack under the nose of a scholar (Jane Fonda Workout Book had the same effect subliminally unfortunately). And I found both the book and workbook on Thrift Books for around 5 bucks each and talked a friend of mine yesterday, one who I do these kinds of self-help explorations with, into taking the journey with me.

But then….then the self-help paragraphs of Forever Fit metamorphize into Cher talking about beyond books and tapes and about therapy and how she once thought it was “a bunch of crap” and “horseshit.” But at a particularly bad time she reached out to the author Scott Peck (listed above) for a therapist recommendation. She was experiencing a build-up of medical, personal and career issues just “a few months” after winning her Oscar for Moonstruck. (You would imagine that being the most blissful time in a person’s life, endless months of basking in an Oscar win.)

Cher says she didn’t want a woman therapist because she thought they would not be smarter than she was and that you need a therapist who is smarter than you are (even if you have to try a few bad ones out first). She admits this was “unbelievably sexist and stupid” but “that was my experience” and the author Scott Peck ended up recommending someone, a woman, who ended up being just what Cher says she needed, someone who taught her a lot and uncovered things she had been suppressing.

I’ll end with Cher’s own amazing words:

“I was afraid of change for a long time. But as I changed, I found it more comfortable than I anticipated. And so it seemed more intelligent to keep changing. I was always really critical and demanding of myself and other people and got really angry when people didn’t do what I wanted. I learned they can’t always do what I want. The expectation is stupid and childish….I learned to observe without judging. I am now a much nicer person. Everybody comments on that now. I used to go through life completely tough on the outside and never reveal my insides to anyone. I always loved other people but I could also be curt and critical and showing love by criticizing.”

Cher says she felt it was her job to fix everything all the time because ever since she was 6 years old in her family unit, that was her job. “Everybody came to me with their problems.” And she would get overwhelmed and cranky.

I don’t know. I just thought it was really brave to say all that.

Oooh! Shortcuts!

Wigs and Courage

October 23, 2025 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

Who took this picture? Why do I have a copy of it?

I have just spent two months wrestling with two wigs to make one of them presentable by Halloween.

This wasn’t my idea but I have been asked to put together the Cher costume. I’ve only worn it twice before and honestly I didn’t feel very Cherlike in it either time. In fact, I’d much rather be a cardboard TV box with knobs and a picture of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown drawn on the front (a costume my brother Randy made for me when I was 7) or a little devil (a costume my grandmother made for me when I was 8) or a dinosaur or a pirate or some other ridiculous thing. But the Cher costume was requested as part of a funny group idea and so here I am pulling out the dress my sister-in-law Maureen gave me, a midnight blue polyester gown from her 1970s-era Homecoming dance with my oldest brother. It’s the closest dress I’ve ever had to a 70s Cher gown.

And so I’ve been brushing and steaming these god-damn wigs for weeks, soaking them in fabric softener and all the things they recommend online but to no avail. They’ve been tangling into monstrosities in the costume box for many years now and they’re done.

Meanwhile, I could have just purchased a new one for 20 bucks. Sigh.

As I take out Maureen’s homecoming dress out of my closet, I am also reminded how I used to always look to her to see what milestones I would someday encounter as a girl: dates with boys, dealing with their parents, a prom, a wedding, babies. She’s been a real sister to me. (I’ve written two poems about watching her for life clues.)

Despite the forgiveness of polyester, I could now be too hippy for that old dress. Praise Cheesus for all the zaftig Cher drag queens who have gone before me. But I’ve had to purchase a “Believe” suit as a Plan B.

Anyway, the whole experience reminds me of the first time I threw together this very Cher costume for a date who took me to a Halloween party of young Kraft Food employees (where I was working as a Kelly Girl at the time) in White Plains, New York. My date went as a cow. The cow costume was very cute but it didn’t mesh well with my Cher, a character unlikely to fraternize with cows and I shredded long black hairs over him all night. I also now recall his complete lack of enthusiasm in helping me figure out how to get into Manhattan for an internship at Penguin Books. This was a few weeks after the Halloween party.

When I got to New York to start a graduate program at Sarah Lawrence College, I was full of fears. I was afraid of the telephone, for example, even though I was often sent out as a receptionist during many years working as a temp. What bad luck that was.

My first boyfriend in college, god bless him, had to get on the phone to try to resolve all my questions about birth control to the nearby Planned Parenthood office because I was afraid to talk to strangers on a phone. To their credit, they wouldn’t tell him anything (assuming he was up to no good snooping). But he rolled his eyes and tried.

And phones may have been my biggest fear but they weren’t the only one. There was my fear of cliff ledges, sinkholes, hillbillies, the parents of my young friends, and swimming pools with anything decorative painted on the bottom of them.

When I got my internship at Penguin in Manhattan, I had no idea how I would find the wherewithal to get myself on a train to the subway system and down a few blocks to the Penguin offices in lower Manhattan. That was too much new stuff to deal with, too many overwhelming opportunities for things to go wrong, too much energy to zap my delicate constitution!

I was renting a basement apartment in a Yonkers house owned by a middle-aged Italian chef and his wife who spent half the year in Italy (chef-ing) and half the year retired in Yonkers near their grown-up kids. The movie Moonstruck didn’t even make sense to me until I sat in their house with the plastic runners and plastic couch covers. Besides them, I hadn’t met many other friends yet at Sarah Lawrence. The only new friend I had so far was the aforementioned blasé cow. Finally, after much cajoling, he did agree to accompany me from the Bronxville train station to Grand Central on the Metro North and then to walk me through the grand atrium (which always felt to me like walking through an exciting vortex) to the correct subway tunnel so I could at least see the token booth. (Yes, this was even before subway cards.) But that’s as far as he would go.

The internship turned out to be both parts frustrating and delightful. There was an endless flow of subsidiary rights paperwork that came in via faxes faster than we could deal with it, a basement contract file room that was a shambles of misfiling and the whole publishing industry that was a bit depressing tbh. But there was also getting as many free galley copies of books as my backpack would hold, being able to read the manuscript of Stephen King’s wife Tabitha’s first novel, which wasn’t very good, and best of all holding in my hands the original contract for John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath.

But how did I even make it that far? In the end, I had to make use of the baby-step method.

I had to get up in the morning and drive myself to the Bronxville Station. If I felt freaked out, I could turn around and go home. If not, I could get out of the car and buy a train ticket. If I felt freaked out then, I could turn around and go home. If not, I could get on the train and sit down, ride into Manhattan and get off the train at Grand Central. If I felt freaked out there, I could turn around and go home. If not, I could walk through Grand Central to the subway, (past the oyster bar I never did get a chance to visit), maybe buy an everything-bagel with cream cheese at the kiosks by the front door. If I felt freaked out there, I could turn around and go home with my bagel. If not, I could buy subway tokens from often-grumpy booth folk, get on the subway going across Manhattan and then make the subway connection going south. If I felt freaked out at any time on the subway, I could turn around and go home. If not, I could walk up the subway stairs and out of the street and orient myself to the four corners of the earth. If I felt freaked out about that, I could turn around and go home. If not, I could walk into the Penguin offices.

And this was just for the interview!

But I did it.

I didn’t turn back.

I didn’t wig out even one time.

In 2023 I found myself reciting this whole ordeal to some old Sarah Lawrence friends who had, since the 1990s, become too intimidated to go into Manhattan from Long Island themselves. (!!) Baby steps.

And it turns out, I had an unforeseen support system. I was always surrounded, my whole time in New York, by helpful New Yorkers, not just people on the street but particularly the Italians I lived beneath, (the chef snored and my basement bedroom was right below theirs), and those Italians I worked with at Yonkers Contracting Company. My brothers often kidded me about working for Italians at a New York construction company. Randy (of the 1976 TV set costume) used to ask me if my co-workers used terms like “concrete shoes.” They didn’t. Instead, I gained a lifetime love of penne alla vodka from their big Italian retirement parties. They all treated me like a lost little bird (which I was) and were amazed I even wanted to go into Manhattan to begin with.

The beautiful women working there with their big 80s perms (it was the mid 90s) told me they hadn’t been down to Manhattan for over a decade, since their high school trips to the Statue of Liberty. (For a time in my life I was able to tell the difference between a Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn accent.) Those people watched out for me and gave me life hacks for managing the pitfalls of their city, from how to outwit a slumlord to where the couch sales were at the Cross County Mall. I still have that couch. That couch has been all over the country.

Soon I would meet Julie (and other SLC students) and we would go into Manhattan quite often by train and by car using some of Julie’s fearless life hacks.

In that bustling city, I was going anywhere fast, but I was moving forward and even that, in ever so small amounts, can build its own energy and opportunity.

Before I left St. Louis (and a summer in Boston), my own family had many, many, many doubts about my ability to move to New York as a graduate student. My oldest brother predicted that New Yorkers would eat me alive. Those were his exact words. And I remember navigating my first bank account meeting in downtown Bronxville one day fully believing I would be eaten alive that day. After all, meeting with strange bankers all by myself was something I would have been terrified to do even in the suburbs of midwestern St. Louis.

Sometimes I still can’t believe I did it. It was big. It was a big deal that I did it. And if I never did anything else in my life, I did that.

The insurmountable overwhelming.

Julie and me lifehacking our way out of a corn maze in the 1990s.

Cher Scholar’s Deep Thoughts

June 24, 2025 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

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

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

Dark Lady, The Unlikely Musical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Compilation of John Wilson’s Cher cartoons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S66oBEhaKSU
Compilation of the WarnerBros/Phil Spector Cher singles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nkdKRLjoxA
Cher’s narration of the Ugly Duckling story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltLX8BdeMQA

Fan Theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social Capital

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being Ahead of the Curve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deep Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

Memory and the Space Shuttle Challenger

March 23, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 2 Comments

This started out as just one little story but it has tripled into three very tangentially related essays.

Recently I’ve been reading some Proust auxiliary material and another essay sprouted called “Proust and the Fan Squeal” and a third summary to wrap up a project on my inability to become a super-fan of Philip Levine.

I’m at the stage in my life where I’m lamenting with friends over our faulty memories and so sometime last year this story started to coalesce. I decided if there was ever a Space Shuttle Challenger remembrance, I’d complete it. So, like clockwork, I started seeing Twitter memorials this January for the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Calculating the anniversary (37 years), I’m even sure why we were memorializing this past January, but maybe the tragedy was on the collective mind. Yet another Twitter meme saw someone attempting to define big moments of American generations by national disasters, and for some reason they assigned my generation, Generation X, to Watergate. I’ve been polling my friends about this and none of us can even remember Watergate at all. Most say the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion…maybe, but more likely the assassination attempt on then-President Ronald Reagan.

Knowing my Generation X, I suspect our “moment” is probably more likely to be something irreverent and kitschy, like the first Brady Bunch reunion special.

But anyway, I thought it might be a good time to tell a story which is ostensibly about the day of the space shuttle explosion but also about my memory around that day, and what memory lets you have and not have.

I went to a nationally-recognized public high school. The year I graduated, my school was in, like, one of the top 25 public high schools in America or something like that. I don’t know how I happened to luck into that except when our family moved from Albuquerque to St. Louis, a real estate agent told my Dad he should aim for a house in a “good school district.” This wasn’t something one really thought about in Albuquerque; there weren’t that many great public schools to pick from in that very poor state. And in hindsight this was probably just some kind of institutionally racist suggestion on the agent’s part to encourage my Dad to pick a white neighborhood where the schools districts had more money and therefore could purchase premium teachers.

My Dad picked a neighborhood called Old Farm, (named for the old farm that once sat there), and its high school was in the Parkway School District, (which was big and had a lot of money). But our school, Parkway North, was most decidedly the least wealthiest of the schools in that district. The big houses were in the neighborhoods of Parkway Central and Parkway West.

But we happened to have an unusually good slate of teachers, like inspired teachers. One math teacher my brother and I had came in early every day to help us through Algebra. And our English teachers were superstars: Mr. Whaling had his Shakespeare students dress up once a year to re-enact a play; the grouchy composition teacher, Mr. Moceri, would do a mole impersonation on the last day for his honors students; and the iconic literature teacher, Ms. Eichorn, was the teacher who probably had the biggest influence on me.

Ours was also the kind of high school where over-achieving teachers probably in large percentage applied to NASA’s Teacher in Space Program in 1986, the teacher selected to go up in the Space Shuttle Challenger. You didn’t even have to be a science teacher to get selected. In fact, the winning teacher was a social studies teacher.

Of the 11,000 people who applied, I imagine many of them had to have been our teachers.

I remember the day of the shuttle disaster quite clearly. It was January 28, a Tuesday, and I was walking through the school’s open library which sprawled across the center of the second floor. I was actually headed to Ms. Eichorn’s honors American Literature class. Toward the side of the library was a large TV, (the deep square kind we had at the time), set up on a portable A/V stand. A circle of teachers and kids stood around the TV watching the shuttle launch that morning. I remember thinking, “Science…ugh…dull! Are those people really that interested in this?”

And the takeoff must have happened right then, (although my memory is foggy on that point so maybe it happened right before I came into the library). In any case, there was that unforgettable silly string of smoke on the TV set and it looked very unnatural for a shuttle launch and everyone was confused for a second and wondering what had just happened because nobody could even make sense of it until the TV announcers confirmed the catastrophe and the obvious demise of all the astronauts.

Everyone in the library was upset just immediately then.

It’s a good thing to remember here that seven people died instantly that moment, including the pretty high-school social studies teacher, Christa McAuliffe, who hailed from Concord New Hampshire. She was a teacher who symbolized, (at least for a lot of teachers), a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play astronaut for a minute. If memory serves, this was the first time it was even conceivable to anyone that an average person could go up into space without having to become a professional astronaut, which equated to like professional genius back then.

This particular shuttle was heading up into space to study Haley’s Comet and to deploy a communications satellite, which seems a bit ironic now considering all the satellites that connect us to all our worldwide disasters and live TV events. But due to the cold weather that day, a faulty O-ring seal caused a live, televised explosion.

A stiff, rubber o-ring.

But alas, all this was actually the last thing on my mind that moment. My first thought was, and I remember this quite clearly, “Oh God, I hope this doesn’t preempt John Waite’s guest VJ spot tonight on MTV.”

“I’ve been waiting a long time for this.”

“I mean MTV’s whole station identification is a rocket shooting up into space and a bouncing astronaut so…”

Now…if I can get ahead of this thing for a minute…in my defense I just want to that say, first of all national disasters were constantly preempting previously scheduled television happenings. I remember thinking, “Today Challenger? You do this today?”

But secondly I would like to remind us all that most teenage girls are highly self-absorbed and probably borderline sociopaths, just like all college boys are highly self-absorbed and probably borderline sociopaths because girls are ahead of boys in most things. You know, ends justify the means in attention-getting schemes?

I also knew, instinctively, that this was not an appropriate response to the space shuttle explosion and as such I have kept it completely on-the-quiet until this moment. I just clammed up and marched myself right over to Ms. Eichorn’s class.

At least that’s how I remember it.

When I arrived to the class, I saw Ms. Eichorn was visibly upset with what I would imagine, in retrospect, was most likely survivor’s guilt. If she had applied to be the selected teacher astronaut, like tens of thousands of other teachers across the country, she might have felt slightly to bitterly disappointed at first that this Christa McAuliffe person was the one chosen and not her. After the explosion, feelings of lucky guilt might have arisen quite understandably.

Ms.Eichorn’s reaction was to immediately tell the class we must write an emergency essay, (and this was a literature survey class, not a composition class), about what we were thinking about when the explosion happened and what it meant for us all as a country.

“No fucking way,” I thought. “Not a chance.”

In hindsight I do get her response, but at the time I remember thinking this was a complete over-reaction.

I’m sure I dashed off something quickly late that night after watching John Waite guest VJ on MTV, recording the show on my VCR and then rewatching it six to ten times. Yes, the show did proceed to air but with the station identifier discretely removed. “Appropriate response MTV,” I thought. “Nothing more required.”

Second disaster quietly averted.

But another disaster was afoot because Ms. Eichorn read our lousy, quickly-drafted, sociopathic teen memorials and Lost. Her. Mind.

We were subjected to a 50-minute lecture on our heartlessness and bad writings. I thought she should have given us a break. I mean, we were teenagers after all. I was just happy I wasn’t the only malformed one.

In fact, the only kid who did do a good job on the assignment was a kid named Maurice. This wasn’t surprising looking back. He was probably by far the most mature one of all of us. I didn’t know him very well at the time but later that fall we would go to the Homecoming dance together and it would be one of the most fun nights of my life up to that point.

To quickly digress with a recap, Maurice first took me to University City (a city suburb of St. Louis) where there was a Jamaican Restaurant. My parents would never go farther than a two-mile radius from our house to eat so this was a real treat, destination dining. Then we went to the dance, (which was kind of boring except for the fact that we both looked so good…I mean in a ridiculous, 80s kind of way), and then we changed out of our glamour duds and he took me back to University City to the Varsity Theater to see the midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show which I had never been to and was so thrilled to be witnessing. And then we went to a grocery store back in our neighborhood and tried Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream for the first time which I had never even heard of!

A few weeks ago I was looking for something in my garage and I actually came across Maurice’s Challenger essay in a crazy moment of serendipity. It was in a stack of favorite writings of friends from high school and college. It looks like it was published in one of our year-end memory books, the kind where you could leave messages to all your friends. I contacted Maurice through Facebook and asked him if I could excerpt passages from his essay here in my essay. He said okay, why not? His much-more-mature thoughts about the disaster were as follows:

Maurice said he was writing through fear of judgement but he decided he was going to be honest anyway. He listed emotions as he felt them in a particularly sharp self-assessment for a 16 year-old: surprise, interested shock, laughter (his first reaction was laughter at the absurdity of the technical mishap) . He admitted this first response of laughter was “not super socially acceptable.” Then he felt wonder, a horrible curiosity, horror at seeing death made real, a desire to keep watching the televised replays, fascination “at the instantaneous moment of death,” a chill at watching people die, the feeling you were watching your own self die, amazement over “the fact they were doing something that seemed so fun,” a realization that the astronauts might not have ever realized they died, and tears at the end, then a lingering sadness.

Maurice also expressed sympathy for the spectators who had no idea while they would be witnessing sudden death that instant of takeoff. And in his final paragraph, Maurice zeroed in on the #2 teacher, the runner-up teacher, the one who didn’t get to go up into space and that teacher’s face as it was captured by TV cameras while watching the #1 teacher’s demise.

It makes you think about what good fortune really is, something much more nebulous and ambivalent, like the old Zen story about the farmer with a son who had a broken leg. Luck and fortune sometimes reveal themselves over time.

Deep thoughts, me.

So I re-read Maurice’s essay and wanted to think I’ve changed between then and now. (See me adulting?) I mean these were all the same thoughts and feelings I had on 9/11. We heard the news “America was being attacked” in New York City. I had just come back from NYC the day before. My friend Julie had set up both an interview for me at McKinsey & Co. and a John Cougar Mellencamp concert for us at Jones Beach. A group of my co-workers and I went a few floors up into another company’s offices, (they had a small tv), and surrounded by strangers we witnessed 9/11 unfold on live TV. I remember someone saying, “One of the towers is gone” and we all thought this must be a trick of a helicopter’s camera angle. It was the same TV confusion.

Anyway, while digging through some photos recently I also came across a photo of Ms. Eichorn’s classroom that semester. My friend Lillian was drawing Notre Dame on Ms. Eichorn’s classroom wall and we took our picture in front of it with me, Lillian, Diana and their friend Kathy.

Then last week I was going through some yearbooks. I had a hard time finding my own class in each one. And I couldn’t recognize most of the names in my own class.

When I was 17, I could identify all 400-plus fellow students of my senior class, save one person who I just never managed to have a class with. I remarked about this feat to my friend LeAnne at our senior overnight party in 1987, saying this would be the last time we would be in a room full of hundreds of people and know all their names.

So this is a significant loss of data here. And it made finding my own Junior picture in 1986 somewhat difficult. But I did find it. It looked like this:

(and that was as high as my hair ever got, by the way). Scanning down the page I was surprised to find snippets and pictures about the Challenger explosion on the very same page. That’s what a big deal it was.

But whew, right? Thankfully nobody could possible imagine what my initial reaction to the explosion had been….except for some godforsaken reason there’s a pull quote next to the explosion photos…

from me.

God. Dammit!

I have no memory of being asked about the challenger explosion, no memory of saying anything about it, least of all saying anything so remarkably dumb. No memory. This was a shock to see.

And this is just great because now any Junior from 1986 with a last name falling anywhere between Kirsch and McCullen can one day look up their picture in the Parkway North High School yearbook and see this pull quote about the Challenger explosion and think firstly “Who the hell is Mary Ladd?” and then secondly “Man, what a heartless boob she must have been.”

Sigh. Ok. Enough of that.

This is an unrelated-but-sort-of-related story about failing memory. When I was eleven or twelve I saw a man get murdered in a park.

My friend Christy’s dad worked at McDonnell Douglas where many of our dads worked. He brought Christy to his department’s summer company picnic every year and she was allowed to bring three of her little friends. LeAnne and I were always solid invites. And then there was always this revolving fourth girl who was the add-on girl every year, the girl who made LeAnne and I extremely jealous. In fact, my relationship with LeAnn probably solidified over this fourth-girl adversity. We were very possessive of Christy. And we made kind of a sisterhood-peace with each other.

On that year’s picnic, all four of us were standing by the curb waiting for Christy’s dad to get the car and pick us up. A blonde-haired man, maybe in his 20s, started running toward us.

(I’m convinced to this day he ran toward us believing nobody would shoot at him if kids were around him.)

We heard what sounded like firecrackers popping and the man fell literally twelve feet from us. All four of us realized at the same time what was happening and we booked it across the street and over a low grass hill.

Like a movie, Christy’s father drove up right at that moment and we pointed at the man who just got shot. To his credit, her Dad hustled us all into the car as fast as he could and got us out of there.

I was convinced that night a killer was at-large and hunting down four little girl witnesses. He wasn’t. He was arrested, if not at the scene then shortly afterwards. The next day the paper reported the murder was a domestic disturbance involving a family picnicking next to the big company event.

I was in St. Louis last November and I met up with my old friend LeAnne for dinner and we talked about this murder. She kept talking about Melissa being the fourth girl. Who was Melissa? I have no memory of a girl named Melissa or her slot as the fourth girl that year. I’m sorry, Melissa, if you ever read this and think who the hell is Mary Ladd? I can’t remember you either.

And it bothers me I can’t remember her. I mean dips and peaks, right? A murder. I should remember Murder-Day-Melissa quite clearly, shouldn’t I?

Well, I do not.

However, I can still remember every video John Waite played as guest VJ that night after the space shuttle exploded.

View the full restored show from my old almost-40-year-old VHS copy.
(Thanks to Dave Fein for restoration magic.)

Proust and the Fan Squeal

March 23, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 2 Comments

If I’m cocky about anything in this life, it’s my nerdiness. I can’t really be out-nerded. I don’t have a stamp collection and I don’t spend my time solving math or science puzzles; but I do plenty of other lit-nerd things, like slog through JStor essays and some very dry, academic books. You can’t out-nerd me by dropping titles like Gormenghast or authors like Proust.

Yeah, maybe you’ve read Proust. How cute. I have a Proust shelf. I have two sets of the Moncrieff translation, (the Vintage edition and the Modern Library edition), the Quarto Gallimard edition in French, Eric Karpeles’ Paintings in Proust (which I perused concurrently with the novel). I’ve read the first volume, Swann’s Way, three times, (once at Sarah Lawrence College, once in a book club and once reading the full epic with someone who had previously read it in French) and along my journey I have the collected The Paris of Marcel Proust, his biography by George D. Painter, lighter fare like How Proust Can Change Your Life and his Letters to His Neighbor, the book that traces the origins of all the characters called A Proust Souvenir (in English and French), and two actual human students of Proust!

And let us not forget the two books of poems based on the novel, Proustiennes by Jean Fremon and The Albertine Workout by Anne Carson.

I have also visited the cork-lined bedroom of Proust at the Musee Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris in Paris, at the suggestion of one of those aforementioned Proust students, Ann Cefola, and I purchased the Lydia Davis translation of Swann’s Way so that Cefola and I could compare the paragraphs of the Davis edition with the Moncrieff edition with the original French novel in a month-long email and phone project to see which translations was more faithful to the original vocabulary of Proust.

It was great!

But none of this is to say I’m a Proust Scholar. That shelf is probably a small fraction of the Proust universe. Actually, I would say I am no Proust expert at all. I only understand In Search of Lost Time in fragments, kind of like I understand the poems of Anne Carson.

And, in fact, after five years of high school French classes, I can’t even speak French! So some of the books on this shelf (like the French ones, for example) are my husbands, a former French major. But I’m still buying and reading essays on Proust and he is not. And I think this is because I am what you would call a fan of Proust, and a pretty flamboyant fan at that (judging by the cock-a-hoop paragraphs preceding).

But even so, it took me a very long time to decide to read Proust. It seemed a pretentious thing to do, even for a lit major. Faulkner, Pynchon, okay; but Proust?

And when I did start reading the world’s most famous novel, I realized it was what we used to call, (in less PC times), very, very gay (as in that is so gay!). Which just means the novel has a queer sensibility and this is most likely because Proust himself was a gay man, a fact I didn’t know and if I had known I would have read the books decades earlier. Because I too have a kitschy, campy sensibility that is very closely aligned to queer culture. Is this because I am a life-long Cher fan? Or am I a life-long Cher fan because I instinctively appreciate camp? It’s a mystery.

In any case, when I describe Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as having a gay sensibility, it’s hard to explain to people what I mean. I keep saying Proust has a kind of exuberance you don’t normally see in straight male writers.

It’s not that certain straight men don’t go on and on about a subject like Proust does but that they might do so in ways like pontificate or lecture. You might hear someone talk about a particular thing they are excited about with words like ‘awesome’ or ‘great’ or, if they’re feeling really compelled, ‘so cool.’ But that’s as hyperactive as they may allow themselves to get; the remainder is at an emotional reserve, intellectualizing, doing what fan-scholar Mark Duffett calls distancing.

And I must say here that when I reference straight males, this is not at all exclusive. Some straight women, gay women, gay men and non-gendered people I know have a tendency to restrain a grand enthusiasm just as much as anybody; but usually they do it for the same reason.

I started putting it all together, myself, very recently while I was reading yet more Proustian analytics, the triad of Living and Dying with Marcel Proust by Christopher Prendergast, The New Yorkers’ May 10, 2021 article “Peripheral Proust,” (where Adam Gopnick ponders why “secondary works on Proust continue to appear in manic numbers”), and the textbook Understanding Fandom, An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture by Mark Duffett.

Today, we have such a plethora of things to be fannish about: tv shows, movie auteurs, music artists, authors, whole food genres. Proust didn’t have many of those things. He had sights (architecture and painting), sounds (both ambient and music), and ideas (books, articles, the Dreyfus affair). Oh, and the Guermantes. He had nobility (which was the celebrity obsession of his time).

In Understanding Fandom, Duffett talks about hierarchies of fandom. All of Proust’s pleasures are high brow, for the most part respectable pursuits. The Proust novel is itself a respectable thing to be a fan of. However, Proust had plenty of what we now define as guilty pleasures including the theater, one of those things that has flipped from low to highbrow for us.

Mark Duffett explains one of the basest of fan gestures is considered to be the fan squeal. It immediately signifies lowliness. And the squeal is most often applied to “girls” because they do it with such lack of inhibition. And by definition this marks these girl fans as a lesser kind of fan because they are offering up an emotional versus intellectual response. And further, any object that elicits the girlish fan squeal will become quantifiably downgraded in the hierarchy of subjects.

You can easily picture this, girls circled together in a bedroom verbally expressing shrieks of delight over handsome pop objects. At its screechy worst, it becomes a public scream, Beatlemania. When boys were Beatle fans, it means one thing. But when the girls arrived, it got screechy.

Steve Miller explains this repeatedly and unapologetically in his book Detroit Rock City. When girls start offsetting the audience ratio at any heavy metal rock show, the band is no longer cool.

Because bitch, please…

You should be a connoisseur not a sentimentalist.

Girls defy this edict, but so do a certain segment of the gay male population, men who also squeal performatively in public. ‘Flaming’ was once the derogatory term used for this type of very effervescent man.

And some gay boys were probably squealing themselves over John, Paul, George and Ringo…behind closed doors. Squealing is actually a highly acceptable practice within most circles of girls and girls hanging out with gay boys. And I believe this is partly why certain types of girls, (equally reactive ones, I would argue), develop such close friendships with them.

I, myself, do the very act of of distancing Duffett describes as a Cher fan. I do this very likely because I had two disparaging, older straight teenage boy music aficionados in my house growing up. Your ideas about music would be discounted otherwise.

Duffett quotes music critic Caroline Sullivan as using the word credibility in her book about the Bay City Rollers. As a fan of boy bands, your ideas lose credibility.

But there’s something absurd about that. And this was part of my original joke, Cher Scholar. But then when I actually began Cher scholarin’ there was respectability inherent in the endeavor. And I appreciated that. It was helpful to me and to the ways we speak about Cher. There’s nothing innately wrong with intellectualizing. But I was probably doing it just as subconsciously as consciously. So I would include myself as one of the straight females who tends to “tone it down,” to downplay my own version of the flaming squeal.

Another thing I notice that I do, and I noticed it while writing this essay and the one on Philip Levine, is that when I talk about poetry, I tone down my academic vocabulary and sentence constructions and when I talk about music I rev it up.

But I actually do love exaggerated enthusiasms and so it annoys me that I self-protect myself in this way. And so I try to offset my reticence with the occasional, politically-willful, calculated squeal. It’s not hard to find the object that will do it. Usually, it’s a Cher doll. In fact, I can remember my first Cher doll squeal all the way back to Christmas 1976. I can get plenty squealy about the dolls.

Because I can.

Speaking of dolls, I am revamping the nativity of the Christmas Cher doll tree.

I finally bit the bullet and bought the Val Kilmer action figure from the movie Willow. Then I found a hip, online paper doll artist from Perth, Australia, for our new nativity member, Alexander Edwards, and we had no Robert Cameletti! How did that happen? And while doing that, I decided to upgrade the paper dolls for Gregg Allman and David Geffen.

Anyway, we can see that there are strict boundaries around fandom all the time. And here we come back to Proust. He can go on for pages and pages of happy exuberance about a madeleine in a cup of tea, the passages of the moon or a flower patch. He uses words like bliss and glorious over things like train timetables, steeples and trees.

And although arguably he doesn’t squeal in volume, I would argue he does squeal in the amount of ink dispensed and the emotional particularity he demands from that ink.

Even if you didn’t know Marcel Proust was a gay man, you might consider the long, meandering Proustian sentence feminine just as you may consider the brief, single-syllabled Hemmingway sentences as masculine. That’s the dichotomy, although it’s inherently unfair (and inaccurate) to both Proust and Hemmingway. Hemmingway famously had his own feminine side and as for Proust, as feminine as any gay man might seem he is still a man.

The dichotomy is false but easy to digest with our primitive ‘othering’ instincts. And intellectual distancing is an armor, which makes straight men particularly good at it. It’s a masculine effort. Women and gay men tend to have less armor, by design or by choice.

In any case, this is my somewhat distanced yet attemptive emotional fan squeal about Proust’s own fan squeal. And such as it is, I value it more dearly than all the nerdy academia of Proustlandia and you’ll have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands.

More Moonstruck, Bobbleheads, Biden and Interviews

March 5, 2021 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

Another good Moonstruck review appeared in The New Yorker while I was away.

B.D. McClay admits this movie’s “selling points have always been a problem" and then delves into the psychology of our inner wolf-ness. Huh. Something just dawned on me. Anyway, many characters in the movie, McClay notices, are “torn between who [they are] and who [they believe] themselves to be.” Loretta can’t “admit that she is a wolf, too” and “her coverup is a form of agency, ” her “own wish to feel in control, just as nothing is driving her father’s affair but his refusal to admit to his wife that he fears death.” Interesting.

McClay also interestingly notes that Ronny’s exasperation of Loretta in his line “I ain’t no freakin’ monument to justice!’ is ultimately ironic because he has indeed become a monument to his own pain. McClay also feels the idea of family is almost more important in this story than the escapades of the couple, “being a member of a family, you assume a kind of doubleness among people who have known you for a long time, which is part of what makes trying to be somebody else appealing.”

“You could flip over the table and see what happens” McClay says about taking life risks and compares the movie to Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, especially As You Like It. The movie “shares the same spirit. It’s a comedy, but it’s deeply obsessed with death, to the point that it opening a funeral parlor.”

Not many reviews and pieces for Boobleheads came out and they were ultimately unsatisfying anyway. People Magazine interviewed Cher. She says, “No one has ever asked me to do voice-overs” and called her voice “a strange voice.” She also states, “This is a film for young people. Little kids don’t know who I am.” I wonder if little kids believe Cher is simply just another a character or bobbledom. “For me, it was a story about being yourself…[a movie] that sends a good message.”

When asked, she admits she does have a bobblehead of herself (I’m assuming custom made) and says she “might be a little bit old [for them].” Well, not me sister. For some reason this movie has made me feel insatiable with the desire to own a Cher bobblehead. There's also a mention in Entertainment Weekly and Exclaim for some reason only reviewed the trailer. Dude, we can all watch the trailer. What purpose do these trailer reviews serve?

There were also some bigger general interviews:

Good Housekeeping

Kayla Keegan notes Cher’s “fearless devotion to being herself” and catalogues all of her public activities of 2020 and summarizes her life a bit. Most interesting was Cher's memory of the first book she actually enjoyed reading (after struggling with dyslexia), a book given to her by Sonny called The Saracen Blade.

The Guardian

Simon Hattenstone elicits some good comments in this Guardian interview. He notes on the outfit that made such a splash in London in December, the “two-tone black-and-white beret, matching jacket, skinny jeans, black boots, black mask, and an elephant-shaped knuckle-duster.” They discuss Trump and Biden, Kaavan the elephant, her Free the Wild and Cher Cares charities, the California fires that burned the side of her house, the price-tag for her Vegas show (an estimated $60 million a year but she defends that this supports 100 staff…Hattenstone also notes her estimated worth of $360 million). Sonny is referenced as her “Svengali and lover” and they talk about her feelings about him after he took all their shared earnings and then some. She talks briefly about Camilletti and Allmas as well.

Hittenstone notes that Cher “has a touch of Mae West about her” and “a surprising stillness.” He calls her a “serious, understated actor” but also notes her recent “gloriously camp cameo” in Mama Mia. (You could say that about all her recent roles.) He says she’s “never quite received the acclaim she deserves” and that “very few women have been so empowering for other women” due to her independence, longevity, chutzpah and level-headedness. He also remarks on her “steadfast” sobriety despite her very public dramas.

He mentions that in his experience other “megastars are evasive, talk in soundbites or reel off anecdotes on autopilot. Cher answers fully, as if considering every question for the first time. She doesn’t pretend to be your friend or feign intimacy.”

Although she refuses to accept his linking her past plastic surgeries to the current trend of teenage girls going under the knife. Hittenstone calls her “freakishly fit” which seems like only something you would only say in 2021.

She mentions in the piece that she’s working on saving a gorilla and another elephant now.

CNN

Oscar Holland at CNN talks to Cher about gay men, her son Chaz, Kaavan and Biden and the recent news that she may be directing a movie soon, tangentially related to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. She’s also working on a new album, which begs the question of where the ABBA2 album got off to. Maybe it succumbed to Covid-19. Hopefully not.

Covid Masks

September 3, 2020 / Cher Scholar / 1 Comment

I'm going on vacation next week but I wanted to post something short before I go.

Lots of fans have been buying sporty and fun coronavirus masks printed with their favorite artists and sports team logos. We have quite a few Chiefs masks in the house.

In June, Cher's official site offered Chiquitita masks for her last single…and celebrity obsession demands you have plague mementos so…

Well, in any case, Cher's masks still haven't shipped (neither have the puzzles) and germs and boredom can't wait so luckily I received two belated birthday presents that were Cher masks from Etsy:

No store listing came with the above "Take Me Home" mask.

This Sonny & Cher mask looks like camo my friend Coolia said. I can't quite place where the animation is from? Does anyone recognize it? This mask was make by the vegan, one-of-a kind store Clothes Horse Clothing.

If you search 'Cher mask' or 'Cher face mask' some interesting things come up.

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

August 26, 2020 / Cher Scholar / 1 Comment

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.

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:

Cher needlepoints circa 1978/9.

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

And here are some needlepoints of Cher:

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).

Cher 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.

Odds and Ends: Believe Cover, Cher Hair Care, Acting vs. Singing, Fan Stuff

July 14, 2020 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

I've been collecting quite a big of odds and ends to report. My last few weeks have been tied up with doctor appointments and electronic poems. So here's some catch-up.

Believe

There was a new "Believe" cover in 2019 from Okay Kaya – and the pattern shows there's always the temptation is to slow that sucker down in the revamp. But it's a nice cover.

Puzzle!

Meanwhile, Cher has come out with some new "Chicquitita" merch, including a puzzle and a face mask, both a must for Cher merch collectors during Covid.

I must admit, I sought out a bootleg Cher puzzle before this one came out. I'm not at all a "puzzle person" but I'm fascinated by people who are. And since puzzles are such a rage right now, I decided I should try it again. What else could temp me to do a puzzle, but a Cher picture. I found a picture of Cher that I love (from her trip to Armenia) and it took a very long time to arrive, at which time I found out it was from the Ukraine. (I'm probably on a list now). Other puzzle solvers I know laughed at me because it was only 175 pieces. But it was hellaciously hard because it was a mostly gray and black pieces. I could have sworn there were times putting it together I actually felt dizzy. But I did it and shellacked the finished product as a testimony to my hard labor. The new sanctioned puzzle also looks challenging with all the white pieces! I'll start on it as soon as it arrives.

Fan Psychology

If you're a fan of Galaxy Quest (that nerdy fan is so charming) you may also appreciate parts of the movie Cruise of the Gods although the fans are way less attractive in this made-for-Brit-TV movie with an unlikable Rob Brydon, a very likable Steve Coogan, and a very young and impressive James Corden. Sadly, I felt I could relate too much to the "scholarly fan" character and the "lovelorn girl fan." I've been very wary of fan cruises (and after covid, hell no) but this movie let me experience the scene vicariously.

Cher Hair

Filing stuff in the Chersonian Institute I found this email from Cher scholar Tyler from 1999! That’s back when Cher fans were just finding each other on the Internets. Anyway….it was a conversation between Cher scholars Tyler and Meghan about whether or not Cher dyes her hair black (from the warm Armenian brown original color). He paraphrased an article he had from the 1970s, an interview with early Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour hairstylist Jim Ortel about how handy Cher was with her own hair with top knots and whutnot, and how she knows what styles look good on her juxtaposed with her nose, chin and teeth. She had the ends trimmed every three weeks back then and in between salon visits, she wrapped her hair overnight occasionally in olive oil!

In Cher Zine 3, we talked about beauty fads like this. Over the last few years, the fads were avocado and coconut oil and now I’m seeing Kelp and castor oil everywhere. When they move to little baby seal oil, I’m out.

Anyway, the end of the story is funny, the interviewer asks about the olive oil night wrap, “How does this set with her husband Sonny?” And Ortel says, “He’s Italian. He didn’t notice.”

That’s somewhere between an Italian slur and the fact that during this era Sonny probably wouldn’t have noticed Cher’s hair if it had been on fire.

Tyler, if you see this, thank you. Were there pictures with the article?

Acting V. Singing

In 1999 Entertainment Weekly posted an online argument between Dave Karger and Jessica Shaw about whether “Cher is better suited for the airwaves or the silver screen.”

Imagine! Here are the pertinent excerpts:

Dave: “Watching her strut around with her unique reckless professionalism confirmed to me that the concert stage is where she belongs.”

Jessica starts by saying “Believe” going to #1 in 23 countries was “no great feat” considering Alyssa Milano and David Hasselhoff received hits in countries like Japan and Germany. (Really?) She says, “Cher’s acting, on the other hand, is purely her own talent and skill.” And she’s looking forward to Cher’s role in Tea with Mussolini playing an eccentric Jewish American.

Dave then says Cher’s Oscar win over Holly Hunter in Broadcast News was a “travesty” [ how about over Meryl Streep in Ironweed and Sally Kirkland in Anna?] and he mentions her real bad films like Faithful. He says more people watched Divas Live 99 than will see Tea with Mussolini.

Jessica then goes off on Cher’s bad concert banter, her collagen and face lifts, her “morphing into another person.” She says high viewership means nothing and trashes the Home Improvement TV show. She ends with, “I have one word for you: Mask.”

Dave: He brings up Cher the actress who gave us hair infomercials.

Jessica: “And your hair has been looking much better since you invested." [snap]

And the squabbling went downhill after that.

Our Local

February 1, 2019 / Cher Scholar / 1 Comment

So part of last year's drama was we had to move suddenly at the end of summer. And we're old and so this was painful but we moved into a much nicer place with room for a Chersonian Institute proper and so all that ended up a good thing. And now we even have our our own mini-pedernal hill similar to Georgia O'Keeffe's because we're situated near the Albuquerque petroglyphs.

We've also been exploring our new neighborhood haunts. Once Saturday we poked our head into our nearest pub called Spinns and saw they were playing a Chiefs football game. The screenshot to the left is from that day watching our new celebrity player, Patrick Mahomes.

This was great and as I turned around I saw a big celebrity mural painted on the entire north side of the place.

And who should I see featured most prominently: Cher herself! She is portrayed as a waitress serving beer circa the turn of the decade. How strange and great! The likeness is pretty good, as Cher art goes.

I even questioned at first if this really was Cher considering the waitress aspect,
but the outfit and face do indicate Cher circa the early 80s and who else has that face?

The full mural with Marilyn Monroe, Nat King Cole and some other celebs I can't identify.

Parts of the mural are very New Mexico-ish, like this picture within the mural of a New Mexico-styled graveyard.