Category: What This Really Says About Me (Page 1 of 16)

Reel Roots and Other Scary Things

March 31, 2026 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

This year some Cher things have been going on that I haven’t had a chance to write about. But considering some of these are mostly private matters (the happenings of her children) I don’t think we really need to really rehash them here except to wish Chaz and his new wife Shara Blue Mathes (married on 8 March 2026) all the best in their marriage and pretty much the same for Elijah who has had some new health and legal troubles.

Wedding pictures that were released to People Magazine showing a family really enjoying Chaz’s wedding. And what a sweet respite from all the national and personal dramas right now.

Anyway, last year on Cher’s recommendation from her 1992 book Forever Fit, I started working through the book and workbook for The Child Within by Charles L. Whitefield.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure which platform or blog I should even be writing about this experience. Substack seemed appropriate (non-Cher or poetry related) but since the idea came from Cher’s fitness book, here we are.

I’m going through the workbook very slowly with a friend of mine Natalie who lives near Oakland. And let me just say: it has been harrowing. An old LA boyfriend (from Belfast) taught me the saying about looking (in this case feeling) as if you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards. And that’s the phrase I always think of after every phone call with Natalie. Hedge bedraggled.

And we both agree the process has made us question a lot of our own responses and requirements from others. It has forced us to dig deep into our respective childhood experiences and explore the stories we tell ourselves about what happens to us now and how we respond. And this has been shocking. I can’t explain to you these phone calls we’ve been having. And we’ve done about 30 self-help books of one kind or another already.

Late last year we came to a similar conclusions about ourselves: that some of our frustrations with other people reflect back on ourselves.

For example here are the questions I’ve been asking myself. Before wanting someone else to step out of their comfort zone, am I stepping out of my comfort zone? Before expecting someone else to stick it out through their discomfort, are I sticking it out through mine? (The answer was no, btw.) Am I also intractable? Am I also stubborn? Am I the closed one? Am I the one saying yes to life? Am I open enough? Am I answering the call?

Digging through the closet where all our baggage is stored turns up interesting things and I’m finding you have to look closely at your criticisms of others (and what that hides about yourself) with some pretty scary honesty.

But if you’re stuck in your life, what else is there left to try? It’s a veritable Barry Manilow moment. Living in a shell and doing okay but not very well. No jolts or surprises and it’s all “very nice but not very good.”

For so long I’ve been in a bad situation and I’ve had no idea what to do about it. For the last few years, I’ve struggled though all sorts of other messes and crises as well until I finally just felt stuck and numb. So last December while my mother was still alive but ailing, I decided to join this thing called Reel Roots. I would describe it as a kind of dating-site/app but for friends. Instead of using your interest panel to match you with a mate, an algorithm (allegedly) is used to set up a girl group for you.

Reel Roots sets you up in cohorts based on Meet and Greets and it takes a few months to set this up and find the group you want to join for a 7-week weekly adventure. And by the time my assigned Meet and Greet came around (February), my mother had then passed, which has not only complicated my journey through The Child Within but I also wondered if this was any time to be perusing such a heavy (for me) social calendar.

But I signed up to say yes to things this year. And committing to new adventures means not only having dinner with new people but also that I should stop saying ‘no’ to Cher documentaries when they contact me. (Another story for another day.)

Thankfully I’ve had Natalie to talk me through all of this. And it’s as if Reel Roots has triggered the very things (emotions and insecurities) I needed to work through and have avoided my whole life.

Sigh.

One of the first challenges, and one of the biggest, has been just dealing with 12 other women and their female energy. (And I’m not the only woman in the group with this problem.)

I grew up with two older brothers. Sibling experience is crucial experience. If I had lived with a sister, maybe I would be more comfortable with and less mystified by female energy. Until recently, most of my close relationships have been with boys and then men. They aren’t competitive with you, as judgmental of you, as most women are with other women. It’s made me act gingerly with all new female coworkers and women bosses and I’m sure a lot of it goes back to my relationship with my mother. But I also have to admit that I have some amazing women friends, co-workers and bosses. And some former bosses and co-workers who have turned into some of my best friends.

And that’s because I have made inroads on this over the last 20 years but by basically gravitating to women who, like me, follow the beat of a somewhat different drummer. Basically, I’ve found my safe-space women. But that has not helped me with the kind of women I don’t understand or the kind of women who make me uncomfortable.

And yes, my girl group has a few of those.

There is a cognitive burden that happens when trying to work on my safe space friendships while at the same time working on my not-safe-space friendships (sometimes happening simultaneously during the same dinner while we’re all in one whole group conversation). Oy.

The next biggest challenge has been explaining myself to new people. My life experiences have been kind of unbelievable and I don’t sell them well.

What? Can that be possible? I blog myself constantly. The thing is what seems open and easy explaining here on a blog is just the fact that I have plenty of time (or the time I need anyway) to edit my way into specificity and getting as close to truth as I can.

Plus there’s the fact that nobody reads it. I have the stats of a monk. There’s that. To be open in art is good and well; but it’s quite another thing to be open out there in the meat space.

Some girl dates didn’t go so well. Many of the days I felt mismatched. Four of us started in an earlier group of older ladies but because Albuquerque is such a small city, our pool of women is also small and our initial group didn’t have the numbers and was merged into a group of younger women. Much younger women. Girls who are still wanting to call each other up at 2 am and go out and break some shit all while yelling out “Ride or Die.”

I love and admire that about them, I really do. But I am not looking for a girl gang as much as someone to go to lunch with. Camping. Board games. Small diners. So this disjunction was potentially an issue. And I might be the oldest girl in my group. And although my innate immaturity helps a lot, there is a big difference between me (60 years old in three years) and a 30 year-old. There’s a big experience and interest gap there. This really becomes clear when talking about how to handle work challenges. Anyone who has ever contemplated how they handled career challenges in the beginning as a young person as opposed to how they were doing it at the end as an older person will know exactly what I mean.

And going round-robin with conversation prompts, I mishandled it often and feel misunderstood. Big trigger. Helpful trigger.

I told Natalie that I had to learn to sit in the discomfort of being misunderstood. On top of that, I had to learn to sit in the discomfort of possibly never being understood. For someone who spends so much time working through my head and definition of self (as ethereal as that idea even is), this was going to take practice.

So every week, more or less, that’s what I’ve been doing. Practicing letting go of my idea of self and the need to be seen. The mantras have been Stay on the path, Keep showing up, Breathe.

Because into the void (of self), all the darkness rushes.

Paradoxically, another part of the struggle is fighting my gray-rocking and just letting myself be seen. (And I think my distaste of cameras is all about that…but more on this later.)

Stepping out. Digging out. It shines a light on things. Light exposes things. It reveals and that’s the point of it.

You can’t have it both ways. If you want to be in the light you have to be open and vulnerable.

As I’ve done one-on-one meetups with some of these ladies outside of the group experiences, I’ve learned from their perspectives that the situation not an either or, black or white. That’s been valuable and I’ve loved trying new restaurants in different parts of town, activities like art night, the one-on-one dates with deeper conversations and connections, and the amazing diversity of the women, their wide-ranging jobs: lawyer, therapist, engineers, scientists, student, teachers, women in business and technology.

Last week I was reviewing a book on celebrity narcissism by Dr. S. Mark Young and Dr. Drew Pinsky and strangely it reflected back on this whole uncomfortable experience:

“Spending time with people you’re closest to can be an important source of emotional nourishment. However, such relationships can be so deeply familiar that their ultimate value in enhancing our emotional landscape is limited. Spending all your time with the same five people does little to change your basic system of relating to others, and can be an outright obstacle to making significant changes in your life.”

***mind exploding ***

“The opportunity for real change, particularly in how you experience yourself in relation to others, comes from spending time with people who aren’t deeply familiar to you, and who are therefore more challenging to connect with. When I meet people who have made major changes in their behavior and sense of self, they often tell me that their willingness to change developed after spending a significant amount of time with someone new and different. Rather than repeatedly experiencing themselves as they always had, these people literally allowed themselves to be seen through a new pair of eyes.”

Wow.

“The great benefit of broadening your circle of interacting is that it allows you to experience yourself in a new context, and quite literally across a wider range of emotions. Many people who have done this say that it allowed them finally to see themselves as they truly are, and that their habits of denial diminished; they gained new insights into their behavior and the impact it was having on others around them.”

There it is. And from a book about something completely different. Serendipitous reading.

So putting myself in a situation that was purposely triggering was necessary to work through the ideas I was exploring in The Child Within. Especially to let go of explaining myself (at least in the meat space).

And it’s hard. (I’m doing it now.)

Natalie and I are calling these things AFGE, which is our code text for sticking it through a new extreme discomfort: another fucking growth experience.

Alive From New York…It’s Saturday Night

January 12, 2026 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

For those of you who know me personally, you’ve already heard the news that my mother passed away at the beginning of the year after a long, depressing battle with COPD.

I had been waiting for the new year to write about Cher’s heavily-anticipated 20 December appearance on Saturday Night Live and now somehow those two things have converged.

The episode was a ratings boost for the SNL, whether you believe this was due to Ariana Grande hosting, musical guest Cher or the emotional departure of Bowen Yang, or a combination of all three. Arianna Grande did a great job. She was funny and mastered many different characters. I don’t watch the show very often, but overall it seemed like a good Christmas episode.

Cher only appeared in one extra skit, the Delta Lounge skit, and then Kenan Thomson did a spoof of “Believe” as a corrupt black Santa Claus.

I watched the show live at my brother’s house in Cleveland. My brother, sister-in-law and niece Eliza were there and one of her local friends came over to watch. It was very interesting to see the show with young women. My sister-in-law asked Eliza’s friend if she even knew who Cher was. My family is convinced Cher is a flash-in-the-pan and no statistics or living legend inductions will convince them otherwise. Alternatively, they could be just trolling me. My family has done that in the past.

But my niece Eliza’s friend did in fact know who Cher was and was decidedly on team Cher because she thought Arianna Grande was too thin and a bad influence for young women because of it. We talked about this at length after the show and looked up pictures of Arianna Grande from years ago. My niece is a huge Arianna Grande fan going back to her early televisions shows so I could relate to what she must have been feeling, having to defend her fandom. This was what Cher fans were doing back in the mid-1970s.

A lot of discussion circled around Cher’s lip-syncing. I am usually pretty good at noting when a Cher song is too close to the album version (“DJ Play a Christmas Song” was an example of this) or when the song may have been re-recorded for the show but Cher makes mistakes in the sing-a-long (“Run Rudolph Run” matched this rubric). But my brother, an occasional live singer himself, found a new tell. He noted one time in the performance when Cher pulled the microphone away from her mouth and the vocal didn’t change to reflect this.

There was plenty of controversy about the lip-sync performances online, too. And what more can I say anyway about Cher and lip-synching or plastic surgery or autotune. Did she or didn’t she? The questions are full of schadenfreude.

I do not need to hear the opinions of other fans and non-fans about Cher controversies. For a lifetime, my own family has needled me with them. They have a particular way of asking about something with an agenda lurking in the shadows of their questions. Like over the years when the Kansas City Chiefs football team loses spectacularly. “How does John feel about the Chiefs losing?” As sports fans themselves, they don’t even need to ask the question. They just like to hear the grieving.

My ambivalence is fully on record (about football, lip-syncing, plastic surgery and autotune). I tend to like live singing, especially on a show that makes so much of its liveness. Even if the singing is not so great. But I won’t exactly rent my garments about all the American Bandstand or Solid Gold episodes of Cher lip-syncing. Cher has sung live on hundreds of television shows in her lifetime and if she lip-syncs on every show from now until the end of her life, it won’t change the ratio all that much. But then again, the people who remember the days of Cher singing live on television are a dying cohort. And with A.I., the past is quickly becoming a fiction.

So…blah, blah, blah.

During my December visit to Cleveland, (a rush visit because my mother was suddenly declining), I learned a bit of the kids’ new slang: parasocial. For the young whipper-snappers this means a one-sided relationship with famous people who are not in any way socially related to you. I am very comforted by this new jargon because it reminds me of when my friend Christopher visited me when I lived near an Amish community in Pennsylvania. We were driving by some Amish playing volleyball and he said something like, “Imagine living your whole life not knowing who Janet Jackson is!” And I replied, “but instead, they know who their neighbors are.”

I get it, but then I’m Cher Scholar. So obviously I’m a conflicted pop-culture consumer.

So when I watched SNL again with my parents that Sunday afternoon, which was also the last moment of television I watched with my mother ever, I wasn’t surprised that she wanted to cover and recover the issue of Cher’s lip-syncing. My mother never did approve of my Cher obsession. And it’s not because she didn’t watch all of the The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour episodes because my parents faithfully did. She just wanted me to grow out of it. Whether this was because she resented my alternate-universe fantasy of glam-parents or because she was simply annoyed by the frivolity of a celebrity obsession, I do not know.

But when she got wind that Cher might not have sung “live” on Saturday Night Live, she kept asking me about it all afternoon.

Now this was also because she was failing. Mostly alert up to the end, the lack of oxygen and build-up of CO2 in her blood was causing her to forget some things and get confused. She might have just been trying to remember if I had said Cher did or didn’t sing live.

Or maybe she was needling me about it. Like if it was the last thing she did… she would remind me of Cher lip-syncing on Saturday Night Live.

My mother and I had our problems over the 57 years. We were very different people. And those differences often chafed. Even if we had been more similar, the mother-daughter relationship is a strange brew even in the best of relationships. But we had both come a long way over the last few years. My December visit with her was very emotional. We knew the end was coming. And for the last year or so, whenever I said goodbye to her I would say, “I love you” and she would say, “I love you too…more than you know.”

And I would always be reminded that this was one of my favorite Cher songs. Similarly, after she died I came across an article about Moonstruck quoting Loretta’s recounting of her emotions after watching the opera La Bohème:

“That was so awful. Beautiful. Sad. She died.”

And the end was indeed awful, in all the ways.

My parents didn’t laugh at any of SNL skits or seem to register seeing the show (or Cher) at all. (And they watched SNL every week.) But then again they don’t seem to watch television anymore the way the rest of us do. They can never seem to consistently remember what they have just seen even a few minutes later. It’s like they’re in their own world of dreams while the television is on.

Two Saturdays later, my mother would be gone.

These last five years have been harrowing for the family, not least of all for my mother. We’ve been up and down on a neverending roller coaster since she contracted COVID back in November of 2019. She miraculously survived that and then things were looking up. Then things were not looking good again and it was a reeling see-saw month to month. We couldn’t seem to keep a direction in sight for longer than a few weeks, good or bad. It was an endless and laborious and heartbreaking switching back and forth. It wore us all down. It wore her down terribly. She was getting better. She was getting worse. There was hope. There was no hope. She was giving up. She was fighting on. Deciding how to be in that world was hard enough but somehow manageable. It was the constant switchbacks. Years of switchbacks.

No, I do not obsess over lip-syncing or plastic surgery or autotune. But what I have always obsessed about is the truth. Let us all acknowledge that which is true. Just be honest about it. Like Zack Bagans’ Haunted Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada. Just cop to your amazing, next-level haunted house and drop the whole museum thing. Just own whatever it is you are doing.

I get fatigued. Especially lately around so many who can’t seem to do that. I’ve also been run down by those who can’t seem to keep track of the things I’ve said. Because after this whole thing, I have no energy left to keep repeating myself. So when for the third time during watching Saturday Night Live when my mother asked me “Did Cher sing?” I responded with a combination of frustration, futility and (in hindsight) maybe even some unintentional kindness.

In the face of her suffocating death and confusion and fear and all the insurmountable loneliness to come and the sad state of world affairs today with all the lies and obfuscations (from even those who happen to love us so), what does it even matter what truth is anymore?

So when my mother asked me for the third time “Did Cher sing? I just said, “Yeah mom, she sang.”

End of 2025 Catchup

December 8, 2025 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

I checked Cher’s merch page and unfortunately there is not yet a Cher snow globe available. But wouldn’t that be swell?

Music

Since I’ve been working on my own Cher rabbit holes (with books and dolls), I’ve been delayed in posting the latest Cher news. And there has been quite a lot of it, the biggest of which maybe happened yesterday.

I had no idea when I woke up Sunday morning that I’d be greeted with news of new music that very day. Cher completely surprised us with a new Christmas single!

Some fans, me included, worried that after months of really aggressively fake Cher news on Facebook, that this too was fake news. In fact, I spent the better part of Sunday morning lying in bed trying to find confirmation on this story. I didn’t even think to go to straight to Cher’s YouTubes. Eventually I just had to rely on the reliable sources of Cher Universe and Cher Brazil. They get the scoops, those young whippersnappers.

I spoke with another Cher scholar and we wondered is this was actually a 2025 recording? There has been no context around this release (interviews, advanced press) and so it’s hard to know. Or is this an outtake of the 2023 Christmas album? Will it be resold and repackaged into the old album to tease fans into buying it once again? The song is heavy on auto-tune, which feels like Cher’s continued middle-finger into the face of auto-tunes detractors, but its also not new.

On the other hand, the lyrics speak to the from-ennui-to-anguish her fans may be dealing with in 2025 in a sort of general way that covers all of our possible scenarios.

The song on Cher’s YouTube
The Lyric Video

I always appreciate the Cher-as-Mother-Figure songs. Her Cheer-Up-Kid gestures always get me. This could be because Sonny & Cher were my fantasy parents. But songs like “Chiquitita” and “Stop Crying Your Heart Out” I find very comforting. This is another song in that category. It’s been quite another rough year from this end (ending with a roof leak among other dramas), rougher probably because it’s also been rough for all my friends too.

Sometimes I feel like I’m losing my resistance and elasticity. (Don’t tell my non-Cher mother. She’s got enough to worry about.) But songs like this are very appreciated from Cher’s own brand of public surrogate motherhood.

This is also a good time to visit the Cher Scholar Christmas Page.

The new song also explains why Cher will be on Saturday Night Live on Saturday December 20, their year-end Christmas show. She’s a musical guest alongside Arianna Grande, but hopefully she’ll also appear in some of the skits. Would a duet be too much?

Let’s touch base next year on how all that turns out.

A Grammy Salute to Cyndi Lauper aired on CBS on 5 October. It was a great special all around with some fabulous and unexpected duets. Cher came out for the finale of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” in a visual tribute to Yayoi Kusama which I love, love, loved!

Last week, Cher also received another victory against Mary Bono but this time at the federal level. Bono plans to appeal all the way to the top! (Just wow. Will the Supreme Court eventually take on this case someday? Let’s hope not.)

Cher Books

CBS Mornings (which has confusingly rebranded since I last looked from the previous title of CBS This Morning) had Cher on the show in November to talk about the paperback version of her Memoir just out. There is an appended story at the end of the paperback version, (to get us to all buy that again) about Sonny and Cher at Martoni’s Restaurant, a very funny one but not the “Laugh In” story that was left out of the hardback version, which is significant I think. Did that even happen at all?

Cher’s Memoir part two was postponed earlier this year until spring of 2026 and now reports are saying it’s furtherly postponed until fall of 2026, which will be two years after part one came out. (That’s the way it is and you’ll like it!)

Anyway, 2025 was sort of an embarrassment of riches on the Cher book front. In another post (this week) I’ll talk about Annie Zaleski’s picture bio and Natalie Hammond’s style guide.

But this week, the children’s book on Cher (from the Little Golden Book people) came out, written by Candice Ransom and illustrated by Laura Catrinella. It’s so brief, it didn’t have the chance to print any egregious errors. Which is nice.

Some of the best drawings include:

: What outfit is this?

: F**king adorable!

: Haven’t we all imagined this story in our heads?

: A very handsome Sonny

: The show globes!

: The redrawing of the Moonstruck poster!

: The sailors!

: Cher glittering her own Grauman’s Chinese Theater prints

And then there’s this picture. I’m sure many Cher fans will fight me on this one but that is definitely me in the lower left-hand corner of this picture. That’s even my facial expression at Cher concerts!

Outings

Cher attended the Swarovski Masters of Lighting Opening Celebration in Los Angeles with Alexander Edwards on 28 October. “On the day, Cher donned a black see-through bodysuit paired with a fur crop jacket and wide pants adorned with chain decorations on the sides, exuding her unique charisma. Her signature black wavy hair and glamorous jewelry highlighted her presence as the ‘ageless diva.'” (chosun.com)

Cher was also presented with a Bambi Legende Award in Germany on 13 November.

: Red carpet

: Fake Cher

: Thomas Gottschalk introducing Cher

: Cher speech

: Heidi Klum, Cate Blanchett and Cher

Cher was introduced around her iconic status and humanity. In her speech Cher said she was proud to be there and felt she had a special relationship with Germany, where people seemed to always been interested in her during her career’s low ebbs. She talked about her inability to save Billy the Elephant from the L.A. Zoo. She kept saying, “I’m just a singer; I can’t do anything.” But then after telling the successful Kavaan elephant story she ended with, “I’m not just a pretty face, am I?”

Movies

Someone reached out to me from Peru about the movie Suspect.

A man named Anthony told me he had recently watched the movie on VHS and “found it very entertaining, full of suspense and interesting moments. For example, the scene in the library” and yes that scene was very delectable!

Anthony said he searched the internet for reviews and found my Cher Zine review “full of details and very interesting observations.”

He said he was “grateful to be able to read it and that there are unique opinions” and he hoped I could read the email “and feel grateful for filling the world with culture.”

I was indeed very grateful he reached out to me. Suspect is a bit underrated as it includes a very bookish character against Cher-type and I think she does a fine job in it alongside a young Liam Neeson.

More About Me

So my friend in San Francisco and I finished reading Healing The Child Within by Charles L. Whitfield (which Cher recommends in her book Forever Fit) and we started on the comparatively very large workbook.

Oy vey! It has been a shocking experience because when I started reading the book, it felt so dated, so 80s. My friend and I have read so many other self-help books between when this one was published and now. And it seemed very substance-abuse related, which was not my family history, (in my childhood anyway). But then it turns out the childhoods explored encapsulated many more kinds of dysfunction under “also ran” where I could find my little self. The book is full of tables and charts and I could see exactly where my therapy in Los Angeles stalled when I left to move to New Mexico. I never got to core issues! Or letting the feelings go!!

So I’ll be restarting therapy next year when my insurance is sorted out. My friend and I are now deep into documenting our true and public selves. Many surprising revelations for us, I must say.

I’ll be making an unexpected visit to Cleveland next weekend so I wasn’t going to finish putting up my Christmas trees. But then I did it anyway just to cheer myself up.

: The bigger Cher tree

: Cher Nativity

: The animal tree

: Closeup of the animal tree with new unicorn

: My mother’s New Mexico tree

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.

The Square Sonny & Cher

October 14, 2025 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

I was going to wait until I watched the Ann Meara and Jerry Stiller documentary before talking about the Captain & Tennille. But I have just gone into the weeds with them and I already have plenty to say.

For the last week or more I’ve been finishing the watching of their TV show DVDs, the DVDs I started watching about 15 years ago when I received the DVD collection as a Christmas gift. I blogged about watching one show back in 2009 and I agree with pretty much everything I said back then except I like Daryl Dragon considerably less. This round there was something obviously wrong with Daryl, something wrong between Toni and Daryl. Well, for one thing, they have since divorced and Daryl passed away in 2019. So that brought some of the shows discomforts into high relief.

Watching the show again turned out to be much more disturbing for Mr. Cher Scholar because he remembers watching the show as a 10 year old and really loving it. Now, we could see the show has plenty of problems, not the least of which is Daryl looking so uncomfortable not only talking but with Toni’s affection. Then there’s the writing, the costumes, the choreography, the sets. But there are also some great segments with Toni and Daryl at their respective keyboards and some great duets between Toni and their guests.

But more than a few times, Mr. Cher Scholar or I said, “what’s wrong with that Daryl guy!” And I even said this a few times, “That Toni Tennille would have been much better off without that Daryl guy.” But since Daryl Dragon’s death, we haven’t heard a peep from Toni Tennille, except maybe on social media years ago. Although Toni said she was retiring from public life after her memoir, she seems to have disappeared entirely. It’s like her public life pretty much began and ended with Daryl Dragon. It reminds me of the end of the movie The Truman Show where I started to feel an awful complicity in my interest in famous lives. So that kind of blows my theory that Toni Tennille would have had a better career without Daryl Dragon. Maybe, like Cher likes to say, there would be no Toni Tennille without Daryl Dragon.

She did do some solo things over the years, a talk show, a traveling musical and a big band tour visiting local orchestras. But her personal life stayed locked in with Daryl Dragon.

It’s a sad story. Toni Tennille loved Daryl Dragon and he quite possibly suffered from undiagnosed autism. I was so flummoxed by watching Daryl on the TV show, I ordered Toni Tennille’s memoir and read it in under 24 hours (it’s short). Tennille never mentions autism but alludes to an abusive Dragon family history instead and issues with mental illness (a bi-polar mother who suffered a bad lobotomy, a sister who committed suicide and a brother who may have also died by suicide). But there is plenty of evidence in her memoir of autistic-like behavior. This is not a diagnosis but it puts us in the ballpark. Something unusual was going on with Daryl. (This is also not a diagnosis but this person reviews the symptoms listed in Tennille’s memoir.)

Now just to preface, I am not a Captain & Tennille fan. I did just recently buy a Toni Tennille doll (which I didn’t know even existed before I bought it and only because it was dressed in a rare Cher doll outfit). I had their greatest hits on vinyl (bought used) and I still have one Greatest Hits CD (with songs I like on it) but I had never previously watched any of their shows, specials or TV appearances.

But I do want to say I really do like Toni Tennille. And all through watching the variety shows, I argued with Mr. Cher Scholar about this. But I have even more sympathy for her now than I did before watching them.

Yes, she’s gangly and manic on that show. We joked that she was definitely an Omega-Mu ( a reference from Revenge of the Nerds). She was actually a Delta Delta Delta but didn’t fit in there. She admits she’s every bit the intense perfectionist she appeared to be. But those things have never been deal breakers for me. In fact, they just make me like her even more, especially after hearing stories about how Toni and Daryl’s peers at A&M shunned them for being unhip for the times. A&M! That’s the label with The Carpenters. But that reminds me I love Karen Carpenter for all the same reasons. Gawky, quiet girls, you have a place in my heart.

Plus, she’s also beautiful and has a great voice which I enjoy most when she’s singing a ballad at a piano. I love her sexy songs too (“Do That Too My One More Time” and “You Never Done It Like That“) and I muchly prefer her latter-day hair.

And I still love the Dream album photos (which the memoir says were taken at Salton Sea).

And when I got to reading the memoir, I found Toni Tennille had much more in common with Cher than I could have ever guessed, aside from people calling Captain & Tennille the square Sonny & Cher. When I first read that I was delighted because it implied for a second that Sonny & Cher were thought of as cool somewhere. But unfortunately I think there were more people who thought of Sonny & Cher as the square Sonny & Cher. But when you contrast them with Captain & Tennille, they do take on a sheen of hipness.

There were so many similarities between Cher and Toni, I started making a list:

In each duo there was a quiet one (Daryl and Cher) and an outgoing one (Toni and Sonny). And the yin-and-yang of that fact became part of their respective schticks.
They both worked with Hal Blaine at one time or another.
There was a previous marriage for each couple: Sonny’s and Toni’s.
Each of their record labels distributed false marriage stories because none of them were married when their first hit landed on the charts, for Sonny & Cher this was the lie they previously married in Tijuana in 1964 and for Daryl and Toni it was the lie they were married on Valentines Day in 1975. Both Cher and Toni claim they didn’t know their record labels were going to do this but afterwards they felt they had to go along with the story.
Both women used the word “unromantic” to describe their real weddings. Both described the marriages as a practical exercise.
Both had a ‘song of the summer,’ Sonny & Cher with “I Got You Babe” in 1965 and The Captain & Tennille with “Love Will Keep Us Together” 10 summers later in 1975.
Both women were the doe-eyed partner in their relationships (clearly shown in that rare photograph or during early duets). relationships where the men seemed checked out (for the end or the whole relationship). Cher puts it this way, “the sun rose and set on his Sicilian ass,” while Toni says the love was “achingly real on my part.”
Both lived half-what platonically together during some or all of their relationships: Sonny and Cher started out in twin beds and Toni and Daryl always had separate bedrooms.
Cher and Toni are both square in some respects. Neither of them drink or do drugs and in both cases this is due to having fathers and/or father-figures who were addicts or alchoholics. They both tell similar stories about their naïveté around drugs: Cher tells a funny story about Redd Foxx asking her for coke and her telling him they only have another kind of soda, and Toni tells a story about how everyone left her Halloween party because she didn’t have a coke room. Both express the fact that they’re totally fine if others want to imbibe; they don’t judge. They both just want to be in control themselves.
Both tell the same story about having trouble getting backstage because security didn’t believe they were with the performing act. Tony had this happen while with The Beach Boys (they had never had a girl member) and Cher in the 1960s when her army of lookalikes confused security.
They both talk about how exhausting it was to do a television show while also making appearances and recording albums, how all they wanted to do was sleep when they could.
Both describe touring as hard. In her memoir, Toni described struggling through the run of Victor/Victoria. Her “wise director” told her “Toni, there are two kinds of actors who want to be on the road: the ones who look at the entire experience as a traveling party and the ones who are usually running away from something.” Toni says, “it wasn’t long until I figured out which one I was.” In Cher’s case, Sonny often laments in his book how Cher hated touring so it’s ironic she did one of the longest tours by a solo artist in history (The Farewell Tour at 325 days).
They both talk about being outsiders in show business even after they hit their peaks. Toni Tennille tells a very sad story about how the Captain & Tennille were invited to the A&M after-Grammys party only after they won record of the year. They realized they hadn’t been invited beforehand and Toni says they never made many friends with industry people who thought their music was square (and there was the issue of Daryl hating to be social). Sonny & Cher (and Cher solo) were also maligned, dismissed and uninvited in all the same categories even after Cher conquered the world. Both duos were made fun of by Rolling Stone Magazine.
Both groups were accused of being kind of lightweight, overnight sensations, regardless of how long they had been working in music.
Both of their husbands produced their albums although Toni had much more input than Cher did and even wrote some of their songs, many of which were about her struggles with Daryl (he didn’t notice). I’ve always wondered what kind of songs Cher would have written about Sonny. But even Toni acquiesced by saying “producing was Daryl’s territory” and how if there were conflicts during recording she didn’t want to “rock the boat.”
They both tell stories of the perils of performing for British royalty. Toni talks in her memoir about the cramped situation performing for Queen Elizabeth and Cher talks in her memoir about the disaster of performing for Princess Margaret.
Toni says that when Sonny & Cher divorced in 1974 and their first variety show ended, “the search was on to fill the void,” to find the “next quirky couple.” Both duos were hired by television guru Fred Silverman (Sonny & Cher while he was at CBS, The Captain & Tennille while he was at ABC) for their respective variety shows. Toni and Daryl refused to do the material written for them in the vein of Sonny & Cher’s disparaging banter because they found it too belittling. “No put downs,” even for fun, Toni said. That’s too bad because a little sparing is a little fun for healthy couples (or a little healthy for fun couples). But it doesn’t sound like Daryl could have accommodated this kind of fun/stress.
To film their TV show, the Captain & Tennille Show rented the old soundstage at CBS where Sonny & Cher filmed their variety show.
Both made the shortcomings of their males stars part of the variety show character of their male stars: Sonny’s refusal to learn his lines and all his flubs, Daryl’s discomfort around talking: both of these things became part of the show.
Both Sonny and Daryl were described as controlling. Daryl wouldn’t let Toni kiss Robert Reed (Robert. Reed. ??) during her appearance on The Love Boat. Sonny wouldn’t let Cher kiss Stephen Whitaker in the movie he wrote for her, Chastity.
Both were faking perfect happiness in their relationships for their fans, either all the way through the relationship or at the end.
Both attributed lack of intimacy as a factor in the end of their relationships. (Guys!)
While they were married to their husbands, both women probably accidentally overheard someone saying “she could do better” and they both were probably offended by this.
Both Cher and the Captain & Tennille were given recording comebacks by the label Casablanca. Both women ironically did not imbibe in the label’s famous party scenes.
Both Cher and Tennille talk about their love of shopping.
Both describe themselves as conflict avoidant.
Both describe themselves as homebodies.
They both have a prominent mention of “I’m On My Way” (Cher / Toni Tennille)
Both women needed a lot of time to realize their marriage wasn’t working (years for Cher, decades for Toni). Tennille’s final straw was when Dragon called her a “fucking bitch” and Cher’s final straw came suddenly after years of exhaustion and no socializing and deciding she wanted to hang out after the show with her friend Paulette and, basically, the band Toto.
The public both blamed both women for their divorces. They were both accused of being the cold party. Cher’s side has long since been backed up by family members and the cast and crew of her variety shows. I would be curious to see what people who worked with Toni and Daryl have to say, but you don’t really need to know. It’s obvious. Just look at his face when Toni loves on him. (It’s heartbreaking to see.)
Both of their fan bases probably date photographs of Sonny & Cher and Captain & Tennille by a system of hairstyles the women had and when their husbands grew their mustaches.
There’s also this:

The Differences: Bill Belew was no Bob Mackie. His costumes did not flatter Toni Tennille and seemed kind of cheap and unimaginative. Maybe if they had continued on with more seasons, the gown budget would have increased. We’ll never know.

Tennille talks about the struggles over the formula of their variety show. The producers wanted 40% music and 60% comedy. But Daryl and Toni were uncomfortable with that because they weren’t comedians; and to be fair they hadn’t spent years developing a comedy act like Sonny & Cher had in their early 70s nightclub act. Daryl and Toni wanted the formula reversed with more music. They finally agreed on 50/50, but it wasn’t until Dick Clark was brought in as producer (after the holiday break) that music was prioritized on the show.

I’ve thought sometimes about how sad the Sonny & Cher ending is but maybe Toni’s story was even more tragic: both of these women were willing to stand by their men through thick or thin. In fact, both of had put up with more than many partners would have. In Cher’s case, she describes Sonny as losing interest in her. “He made it end,” she contends. But in Tennille’s case, she had all the right intentions and all the wrong tools to deal with Daryl’s condition but she spent 38 years trying. In both cases, the women may have stayed in the relationships if the men could have turned it around. Both describe their mates as cold hearts. “How Can You Be So Cold?”

While I was researching this I came upon a reddit forum where someone asked, “Can someone explain to me how the Captain & Tennille were so popular in the 1970s? How did a man in tacky boater wear and a woman who stole Bonnie Franklin’s hairdo become a huge hit?…and WTF with that Muskrat shit?”

Those hairdos were contemporaneous, but okay. (That was one of the Vidal Sassoon looks of the mid-70s.) The answers were all great, but here are the best ones:

“Um, because Love Will Keep Us Together is amaze-balls”.
“Do That Too Me One More Time is a master class on how to write a song about sex without the tawdriness of most modern songs about sex.”
“Acts like C&T provided a cultural bridge between generations.” [Someone else likened it to what The Fresh Prince of Bel Air did for rap music.]
“Media moguls saw an opportunity to water down rock with soft rock for the older folks.” [Except, I would argue, lots of kids liked them, too] “Thus began a long parade of soft rock acts featuring camera-friendly faces for TV.” [They weren’t so camera-friendly, actually, which is why, I would argue, those soft rock faces all but disappeared when MTV arrived.]
[This answer is the whole theory behind the book In Perfect Harmony, Singalong Pop in ’70s Britain by Will Hodgkinson]
“We’d been through the very politically fraught 60s, a horrible war and just coming out of a really bad recession. The vibe was very much ‘I just want to work a decent job, have a drink or roll a doobie, and relax with lady/dude and not have to think about things.'”
Someone else said immediately after that comment, “boy i can see that coming back soon.” [Like for-reals-balls.]
“I was a kid but I played that album over an dover before I turned into a jaded youth.”
[Another favorite response] “A lot of incredibly well crafted and performed songs are given the Comic Book Guy ‘worst song ever’ treatment. There’s no objective reality to this. It’s just a style you don’t like.”

Toni’s memoir begins by describing a violent childhood accident in a garage that severed the tip of her finger at the joint. After years of surgery her finger was reconstructed so she could keep playing piano; but she said she was so traumatized how other kid responded to her mid-surgeries, interim-fingers that she always hid that finger (both socially and in performances). Mr. Cher Scholar and I were intrigued by this and started to look for that finger in the variety shows. And sure enough, we never saw the finger for longer than a blur of a second. The hiding makes her seem very formal when she stands talking to audiences and the camera, her left hand always folded over the right fingers.

the finger-hiding pose

I find that when a person has something small to hide, unfortunately it takes over their whole body. And it’s here, in their respective body languages, where Cher and Toni Tennille exhibit their biggest difference. Cher is fully at ease with her body and Toni is not.

And I will always wonder if Toni Tennille could have gone much farther in music (and lurve) without Daryl Dragon. We will never know. Could this have easily been Cher’s story too?

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.

Rock and Roll and Sex

April 29, 2025 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

We were recently talking on this blog about the Australian Uber Eats commercial and the image of Cher on the cannon (which just made me check the spelling of that word which made me think about the other word and how Cher is so often not considered “part of the canon,” any canon; but in fact she is often commandeering it). But anyway, that image is famously a phallic symbol for many people, although ironically she is dressed casually in that scene and not scantily.

It doesn’t matter. The cannon pulls focus.

Anyway, this reminded me of when Mr. Cher Scholar and I were talking about Cher in the Half Breed outfit (which is his go-to outfit to describe Cher’s sex appeal). Apart from the problematic eroticism of the performative Indian-ness, Cher was just revealing so much skin. Howard Stern also commented on this in his interview with Cher last year, how it was literally embarrassing for him to see Cher perform in this outfit on her TV show while Stern was watching it in the same room with his parents.

Mr. Cher Scholar added something important though: it was also the fact that she was singing astride the horse. And we’re back to the canon again. I began to think this Half Breed moment was more universal for boys and teens who saw it in 1974.

We talk about sex appeal from time to time, Mr. Cher Scholar and me. What stars can tap into that sexuality better than others? Lady Gaga vs. Cher has come up a few times. “I get no sex off her,” says Mr. Cher Scholar, which sounds worse that it is. He means sex-appeal or rather “I don’t find her very sexy personally.”

So what is that mysterious thing that emanates sexuality on screen?

If I’m being honest, the Cher images I find sexier than phallic cannons and horses are from the Take Me Home album front cover or the I’d Rather Believe In You back cover (which showed the shadow of a naked breast!) because they seemed more playful in their sexuality, either because of the costume or the action.

But that’s the difference between human triggers, right there. Some people, like David Letterman, were turned on just seeing her big butt tattoo.

But that shot almost seemed too clinical for me. And the ink itself was not a factor in sexiness, in and of itself. Although her willingness to dip into her drawers to show them struck me as very sexy.

Those acting-era, pubic-adjacent photos felt defiantly daring to me. I never forgot them. I got tired of the whole tattoo thing, especially now that they’re ubiquitous. Besides, my Dad has one. Automatically out of the sexy category forever. (More on this below.)

Cher can be effortlessly sexy, even in paparazzi shots and unstaged photos and I think that’s no small part of her appeal:

Women artists are often accused of selling sex with their music. And there’s a whole fleet of women artists who either keep the makeup on and fight it (Pat Benetar) or lose the makeup and go gritty with maybe only eyeliner if anything (Patti Smith, Chrissy Hynde) or women who take it to a drag-queen level but still maintain street cred (Dolly Parton) or women who try to have it both ways, their lipstick and their badassery (Madonna, Cher). Women who are somewhere in the mix of all this (P!nk).

While I was trying to sort through all this I was also reading some academic anthologies about fandom and the kinds of fans (for a larger Cher project). I’ve been re-reading my marginalia to try and zero-in on how the material relates to Cher specifically (and fandom generally). One book was called The Adoring Audience, a book of essays edited by Lisa A. Lewis. And there I was reminded of the double standard around displays of sexuality for both the artists and their fans.

Women are accused of playing the sex card more often than men (which doesn’t feel true) and female fans are also accused of focusing on sexuality more often than male fans do, what with their love of boy bands, their focus on shirtless, pinup pics (which also doesn’t feel entirely true).

You could argue women face more pressure to display sexuality in performances but you can see just by perusing any teen magazine that most of the pinups are men…marketing their sexuality happily, without much pressure to do so.

As Sonny’s TV show character Alvie might say on Sonny & Cher’s later-day variety show, “turn to any Tiger Teen Hit Beat Bop Parade Magazine” and you’ll see all those male pinups. And sure, those magazines may cater to the girls but I saw plenty of college dorm rooms with pinups and posters of sexy ladies that were gotten somewhere. We all had ‘em.

By the way, I think Sonny understood the value of those teen magazines, which is why maybe Sonny & Cher were in so many of them, embedded into them in some cases. And at the same time you might argue he often tried to tamp down the sex appeal of Cher (as his wife), watering it down in things like the movie Chastity or maybe just not watering her blossoming sex appeal at all. So then Richard Avedon in Vogue Magazine and Bob Mackie had to come along and sexploit the situation. Cher seemed grateful about it. She said before Avedon and Mackie, no one considered her to be sexy.

In the book of essays mentioned above there are a series of excerpts from Cheryl Cline from Bitch Magazine and she goes into the selling of the male sex in those teen magazines.

“Rock stars are sexy. Surely this is not a novel idea? Men can mumble in their beards about the ‘goddamn Tom Jones syndrome’ all they want, but I ask you: isn’t there a hell of a lot of good material for sex fantasies in rock’n’roll?…Playgirl pales by comparison….peddles a narrow assortment of universally handsome, clean-cut, well-formed male model types. Nothing as weird as Ozzy Osbourne, or as sinister as Billy Idol, or as fat as Meatloaf, or as misshapen as Ian Dury, or even as, ahem, old as Mick Jagger.”

I would have to agree with her about Playgirl, which I had to buy surreptitiously as a teen in order to read a Cher interview in it. (I swear, Mr. Paperback Bookstore Sales Clerk, I’m buying it for the articles!!) Like male strip shows designed by men, the magazine was not very sexy. But I did spend a lot of time drawing that conclusion…you know, to be really, really sure.

Cline continues, quoting Lori Twersky:

‘”Many rock star crazed girls have a wide variety of desires. It’s not unusual to find pictures of Shaun Cassidy, Roger Daltrey, Meatloaf, Pat Simmons, and Mikhail Baryshnikov on the same wall.’

.…And what does Playgirl serve up? Tom Selleck. Look at any copy of the sleazier rock magazines and you’ll find at least as many real hot photos of the men as you would in Playgirl. Rock stars are hardly averse to playing the sexpot in the pages of magazines, in posters, in ads, on stage, in videos…it’s all soft core porn, to be sure, but hey, it’s pretty good soft core porn.”

So female pop stars aren’t the only ones who traffic in sexpot. And aren’t we all the better for it? So why are we giving men more agency in this activity? Women are the pressured ones, men are not?

This reminds me that a few years ago I wrote a poem (or part of a poem) about how my mother used to make my bed every day while I was in high school and in doing so she had to face the 3D crotch of a certain rock star on a poster every morning while she was making that bed. What she must have been thinking as she did this? I compared it to me as an adult first viewing a picture of my Dad while he was stationed in the Philippines, out in the sun wearing some low-slung pants and his very fit shiftlessness. What feelings did this picture evoke in my mother? I even asked my mother, did she find this picture sexy? The poem was about how each of us had been forced in this way to experience the unpleasantness of having to consider the other’s sexuality and gaze of desire.

Later Cline goes on to talk about the idea of class, foreignness or ethnicity, something outside of the “clean cut,” something unruly and she uses Elvis as an example of one person triggering all these fantasies in women:

“What made a rock music sexier than Tab Hunter was transgression.”

(It is now very ironic to me that the board game Mystery Date has only one sexy man behind the door: The Dud.)

I would argue that a similar thing was going on with Cher: a hint of ethnicity, not your blonde, clean-cut girl, the symbology of all that hair, and the essential unrulyness. The mysterious, possibly slightly-dangerous, untamable Cher.

And speaking of the female artists who revolted against selling sexiness and reverted instead to playing with the boys, adopting their cultural cues, there are also the female fans who do the exact same thing, the ones who take great pains to appear as if they’re “one of the boys” by focusing more on the music than the performative bodies. They would never squeal, for example, these girls. They have internalized all the criticism of female fandom and co-opted the culture of reserve.

So as a female audience you’re enticed to get turned on by the performance but then you’re disparaged if you do.

In fact, you’re disparaged if you like sexy artists at all. Because isn’t it supposed to be about the music?

But that’s the sad little secret. If one has to distance themselves from their own sexuality, how rock and roll is it?

I like to see a full spectrum of human (consenting) sexuality on display, from tomboy to full-on glam girl, from effeminate to macho, and different looks for different occasions because (and beyond the gender-academics, didn’t Drag U teach us this?) all sexuality is performative. And, in its best display, playful.

Which goes back to why some stars aren’t sexy. As Mr. Cher Scholar would say, “they’re trying too hard.”

Cher’s movie career and television career have given us a little bit of Cher in many different sexualities. And it’s been fun. She’s never been locked into anything. Which is very, very sexy.

As a female fan of both male or female artists, I refuse to check my squeals or trump up much respect for those who do.

As a friend of other fans, many who are people in marginalized groups, people who are vulnerable to this kind of dismissal for freely expressing what they are turned on by, I want freedom for them. They should be allowed to show enthusiasm for the human body without being disparaged as unserious fans, especially when sexuality is completely baked into the whole shebang.

Here is Cher as the very sexy showgirl. And how very seriously sexy she is, too.

Sonny and Leisure Music: The Importance of Music to Conceptual Mental Synthesis

December 11, 2024 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

Cher not only listens to music at home now, but she now records music there too.

I just did a blog post about how my Cher and poetry blogs tie together. This is another blog topic I didn’t quite know which blog to post on. It’s related to Cher but also about the creative process and mental synthesis.

Last night I finally got to the point in Cher’s new memoir where she mentions that Sonny didn’t allow her to listen to music in the house. She says “He wouldn’t even let me listen to music” (196). It’s at the half way point. I knew it was coming. I’ve seen all the interviews. But I wanted to read it for myself before I made it my first post about this book.

First, let me say it’s hard for me not to think about the book as a writer as much as a Cher fan, having thought a lot about the best way to tell the Cher story to a wide audience.

Fans might want a lot of things, but non-fans have a lower tolerance for too much detail or Wikipedia facts as Cher calls them.

And it’s important to remember what the book is trying to do and who the intended audience is. I believe the intention is to reveal insights about the main character to the population at large.

And to that rubric I think, like Mary Poppins, the book is pretty much perfect. I’ll go into it all more later, but it’s hitting all the notes. Some of the factual errors are maybe driving some scholars a bit crazy, but I think the reviews have been pretty unanimously the best of her career. Which isn’t surprising really, that her life story would be giving her the best reviews. Cher is really bigger as a character than any media she travels on.

And I really wanted to blog about recent events in date order: the Spotify playlist, the Victoria’s Secret show, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Memoir but I think now we’ll have to do it backwards. The memoir is just so big and seemingly impactful. Every media publication known to man is looking for an angle story on Cher right now. House & Garden is even weighing in.

At 78, Cher is as hot as she ever was. Which is just incredible when you remember all those lean years of fandom.

So why is it taking me so long to finish this damn book? For one, I’m reading pretty slow and taking notes. Scholars are nerds, after all. I’m also reading other books although I’ve done some drastic paring down to accommodate the Cher book. But I also have book club books on deadlines and the new Murakami book I’ve been dying to read. I’m exactly halfway through that one as well.

So Mr. Cher Scholar says I read more than anyone he’s ever met. Which I don’t think is true, really. Book reviewers, for example, spend a lot more of their day reading than I do. I read maybe an hour in the morning and 1-3 hours at night. I mean I also watch some TV every day or so too.

But I think what he might have been driving at was that I read a lot of books at the same time. Sometimes like ten books at a time, I’m embarrassed to say. I picked up this habit in college when I was taking multiple classes and sometimes a miracle would happen when something I was reading in one class sparked off something I was reading in another class and that’s how I came to write a whole essay on one paragraph of William Faulkner’s Light in August as seen through the lens of a Plato theory about pre-knowledge. Maybe my scheme wasn’t entirely accurate in hindsight but it was a good mental exercise and I felt pretty brilliant about it at the time.

Yesterday I had cause to look up what this type of thinking might be called as it relates to music. I’m not good at thinking about music and I think this is why musical mashups appeal to me. How does someone hear one song and then another song and then think they could find an avenue to meld the two together into a collage. It’s a way of thinking I have no access to. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t but it’s that spark of the idea and then the sewing together that intrigues me, these conceptual combinations we use for everything from inventing new food recipes to creating basic metaphors. How to show like to like and different to like, how to bring disparate things together somehow into a new thing.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about in joke format.

This comic I saw today is a mashup of Door Dash culture and the myth of babies being delivered by stork. Unless you have a lot of unrelated material floating around in your head, you probably can’t make these connections.

I would even guess the bulk of jokes are created by bringing two unrelated ideas together.

Which brings us back to music and Cher.

I read a lot more than some people maybe, but it is nothing, nothing, nothing compared to the amount of music I listen to every day. Like 6-8 hours of music (a day). I listen to music at work, while I’m cooking, while I’m cleaning, while I’m driving, while I’m decorating for the holidays (which I am not doing this Cher-treeless year).

It seems to me a kind of torture to insist that someone you live with not to listen to music in their own house. Cher is talking about the days before earphones were common. Maybe superstars like Sonny and Cher already had headphones. I keep trying to figure out what Sonny was worried about: was it undue influence working on Cher, his musical prodigy? Was he worried about subconscious plagiarism seeping into his own songwriting? Or was he just annoyed by her musical choices?

None of that matters though because listening to music is a human need in my opinion. I can’t imaging living without it. I wouldn’t do it.

Atul Gawande talks about decline of living standards in his book Being Mortal and what animal sense you could possibly lose that would make your life not as worth living. I definitely think not being able to eat solid food would be on my list. But what about loss of hearing? Loss of sight? I don’t do well with audio books and podcasts because I keep drifting off in my imagination and can’t find my way back to the spot I fell out.

Would I rather give up books or music? Ugh. Unpleasant decisions. I just can’t get there.

But back to my earlier point about mashups: Music is a way of thinking. Very different from reading. But those two things talk to each other, just like anything else: knitting, plotting against ground squirrels, surrendering to ground squirrels and building them a hutch.

I don’t really want to give up anything because they all feed together like hungry squirrels.

Not being allowed to listen to music. Inconceivable! In some ways, Sonny was a genius at being outrageous.

Dear Sonny & Cher from 16 Magazine, Part 11

August 27, 2024 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

This is a very typical image for Sonny & Cher at the time, head to head, a bored-looking Sonny, a dreamy-looking Cher. For some reason, this issue has headings, which I can only think serves to take up some space for short questions and short answers. Typical subjects are covered this week, including every girl’s ongoing desire to have Cher-hair. In fact, there’s lots of hair in this one. You could say this is a hairy issue of “Dear Cher….and Sonny” from 16 Magazine!” Har.

Do you have some personal questions that are crying for an answer? Do you need heartfelt advice from someone who knows and cares? Do you feel that there is no one that you can turn to or trust? If you answer yes to all of these questions, please don’t despair—because Sonny and I are really here and we really are going to help you. Each month we carefully read your mail and pick out a cross-section of the most important questions that you ask. If your answer is not here in this issue, keep looking—because sooner or later we will get around to you and your problem.

TRUE-BLUE

Dear Cher, I’m in the tenth grade and I have been going steady with the same boy for over ten months. My problem is that my girl friends are jealous of me. They say that ten months is too long to go with the same boy and that I am too popular in school. Do you think I should break up with my steady and “play the field” like they do? Karen, Wickliffe, Ohio

Cher’s Response:

Dear Karen, “Playing the field” is not all it’s cracked up to be. For some people, there is just one person who has the quality of all persons. These people are very rare. When I first met Sonny I knew that my “playing the field” days were over. He was the “one” I’d been looking for. I have never regretted that decision. Maybe you too are one of the “lucky” people who have found a rare relationship. If you are, forget about those nagging girl friends. They are jealous—because you just may have found the thing they are looking for!

Cher Scholar’s Response:

Ten months! Too popular? Too popular to stay with one boy? Or just too popular unrelated? Like multiple grievances?

Turns out these ideas of “playing the field” or “going steady” come down to cultural pressure. There are decades when “playing the field” is the thing to do (1920s and 1930s) and decades when society puts pressure on women and men to “go steady” (post World War II with a scarcity of men, 1940s and 1950s). Like capitalism, it seems to have to do with supply and demand. After the social revolution in the 1960s and 70s, this became more of a personal choice in theory, but somehow stratified across gender in movies, videos and other cultural materials. This means that in the 1930s if you had many boyfriends you were doing it right. But in the 1980s you could still be coded as slutty.

In a book I’m reading, there’s an explication of the Jackson Browne video for the song “Tender is the Night” (a video I have zero memory of) and male attention is described there as “commanding but fleeting.” And I’m pretty sure after a thousand hours watching MTV videos in the 1980s, that’s what I expected male attention to be. It seemed a strange era of conflicting encouragements, which seems messier than if everyone were just on the same page.

I remember when I was new to online dating. Men on FastCupid were not exactly trying to find quick hook-ups, (like they were on Match), but they were still primarily interested in “playing the field.” And so after getting the idea, I remember telling my friend and roommate Julie one morning that this is just what people were doing now and so I was going to do it, too. Now this plan didn’t last very long because that very same morning the person I dating with at the time changed his mind and suddenly wanted “going steady,” although we didn’t call it that in mid-2000s-Los Angeles. The term then was “being exclusive.”

The point is, these should really be personal decisions but they seem to be cultural ones. My joke has always been that around 2005 I had a Liz Taylor week. And that was been my experience playing the field.

I’ve always wondered about the etymology of the term “playing the field.” According to Dictionary.com, it comes from British horseracing: “it meant to bet on every horse in a race except the favorite.”

Cher wasn’t kidding when she said she only had eyes for Sonny when she met him. She has often described seeing him for the first time like seeing star-filter around Tony in the movie West Side Story. People who knew her then describe her as being infatuated. Like girls and boys in the 1980s, they did not seem to be on the same page.

HAIR-RAISING QUESTION

Dear Cher, How long did it take you to grow your hair? I’m growing mine long and can’t wait until it gets as long as yours. It’s really beautiful. I hope you never cut it! Madeline, Costa Mesa, Calif.

Cher’s Response:

Dar Madeline, Thanks for the compliment. I had my hair cut very short when I was 16, and it’s been growing every since. I keep it about 24 inches long, and cut off an inch or so every three months. If you watch the ends, when yours start to split, cut a little off and your hair will grow in faster and healthier. Good luck!

Cher Scholar’s Response:

Madeline, don’t lose your mind, but Cher did cut her hair. A few times.

My summer neighborhood friends Diana and Lillian both had beautiful long black hair and one day Diana taught us how to cut off our split ends. The Susan Dey book also reminds me we used to shampoo twice every day (a thing called repeat) and we used a thing called creme rinse (before they invented conditioner). Beauty trends are their own circle of madness. Within the last ten years, coconut was the thing for conditioners. Then it was avocado. Then it was minerals from the Dead Sea. Years from now it will be coconut again.

It’s interesting Cher had a target of 24 inches. So specific. Hair was a big deal in the Sonny & Cher mythology from the beginning. Cher’s long hair, as this column has shown, was much envied. And part of the S&C story involved Sonny’s hair as well and the altercations he had with other people (mostly men, I’m assuming) over the length of it. This was mentioned as the reason “Laugh at Me” was composed, a restaurant dust-up over how Sonny & Cher looked. And Sonny’s hair wasn’t ever really all that long.

But hair is also mentioned in “I Got You Babe,” (“let them say you’re hair’s too long”), and in “Somebody,” (“It aint long hair. It ain’t short hair”), and, as Cher scholar Robrt reminded me, the IGUB-copycat song, “But You’re Mine,” (‘that your hair isn’t combed all the time”).

I have never liked the song “But You’re Mine.” It’s a sweet sentiment until it gets nonsensical. The part about “they’ll have to blow their mind”—what does that even mean?

And this line really bugs me, “you’re not real pretty, but you belong to me” as if they would be somehow unlovable if they didn’t belong to each other. I guess possession is nine-tenths of love as well as the law.

Speaking of hair, Sonny shirtless alert….

I actually love pictures of Sonny and Cher in swimming pools. This colorful image was posted this week on the Sonny Bono Facebook page with this back story:

“This photograph was made for McCall’s magazine’s “Teen Idols” story in 1966. Photographer Art Kane strapped himself into full scuba gear and weighted himself down at the bottom of Sonny and Cher’s Beverly Hills pool. He took hundreds of pictures until he got ‘The One’.;

NASTY-NEPHEW

Dear Cher, I am 14 years old and I have a five-year old nephew. He is pretty nice most of the time, but when my boy friend comes over he turns into a real monster! He embarrasses me, bites me and won’t leave me alone for a minute. What can I do? Aunt-in-Distress, Lafayette, La.

Cher’s Response:

Dear Aunt-in-Distress, Sounds to me as though your pint-size nephew has a king-size crush—on you! He is being a pest because he is jealous of the attention you give to your boy friend. This is natural for a boy his age. (You should hear Sonny talk about the crush he had on his third-grade teacher!) Try to ignore those painful punches if you can, and I bet your nephew gets tired of his “games.” He’s only playing them to bother you. Don’t let him!

Cher Scholar’s Response:

I’m trying to remember myself hanging around my brothers when they brought their girlfriends to our house. I attached myself to my older brother’s cheerleader girlfriend like a barnacle sister and here we are today with that. (I really wanted a sister.) Randy had more sense than to bring his girlfriends around, but I do remember a pretty girl named Julie. They came to the house to take homecoming pictures. She was shy but friendly with me. I’m sure I was a pest, just as I was when my brother’s friends were around. I had a crush on one of Randy’s friends. Plus, they were very funny and I wanted to be around the comedy routines.

But I had the opposite problem too, older brothers who teased my boyfriend. That doesn’t always end well either.

Then there’s the issue we discussed a few columns back: where is the line between being a pest and being a jerk? Some teasing seems mean or rude to some people and like foreplay to others.

A quote is going around Twitter that says, “Never tell a little girl that when a boy is mean or rude to her it’s because he has a crush on her. Don’t teach her that abuse is a sign of love.”

I can understand the problem. I was told that by my mother all the time. The point was they wouldn’t give you trouble if they didn’t like you. And I think that’s often true…to a point. Some boys are just teasing. But others are real bullies. And you have to learn to tell the difference. Boys have to do this too, in their own way. You could say all humans have to figure this out. Because girls can be mean and rude just as often as boys can. It’s just that boys don’t find themselves caught in domestic violence situations as often as girls do.

If “just ignoring them” (my mother’s suggestion) worked, we wouldn’t have so many bullies today.

If you’re ever hit, screamed at repeatedly or torn down (even quietly) verbally, the situation has gone beyond “teasing” and this is never love.

Once on Oprah’s Life Class, I heard someone suggest relying on your instincts; but not everyone has a great instincts.

And then some people have difficulty expressing love. I was one of those people. My family was not verbally affectionate. We weren’t huggers. And I can tell you it’s amazing the wonders in-laws can do in a family dynamic, marriages that bring in people for whom saying “I love you” is a matter of course. Sometimes people just need exposure and practice in how to behave more effectively.

I think you just need to be wary of people who have had a bad childhood experience and are looking to take it out on others. Maybe you are the type of person who reminds them of someone who once hurt them. That’s not good.

But back to our little pest here. What is the best way to handle a young boy or girl when they are working off a bad strategy to get attention? We’ve all been there, down the road of a bad strategy. Like anyone using the Scientific Method, this kid had a theory and he tested it out and did not get the anticipated result. Maybe his favorite Aunt should sit him down and tell him it’s time for him to come up with a new tactic.

CLEAN-CUT

Dear Sonny, I’m a guy who gets called “square” by all my long-haired buddies because I wear my hair short! I had long hair before and I really didn’t like the way I looked. I know long hair is “in” now, but I just don’t like the way it looked on me! Should I give in? Bugged, Scranton, Pa.

Sonny’s Response:

Dear Bugged, If you feel better with your hair cut short, wear it that way. Exercise your right as an individual to dress the way you feel best. Fashion is a very temporary thing. What is “in” today is “out” tomorrow. There are lots of people who follow the “latest fads” because they have no real direction of their own. Listen to yourself—you just might be a trend-setter!

Cher Scholar’s Response:

Well, Bugged was not a trend-setter as it turns out. Long hair was here to stay. But as Sonny stated later in 1971, “it aint long hair; it aint short hair.” Everybody do your thing.

This is a good opportunity to play my favorite Sonny & Cher song, “Somebody.”

The LP version without the gospel singers
The LP version with the gospel singers
The radio edit version that has everything but the kitchen sink thrown in, including a groovy intro.

SHUT-IN

Dear Sonny, I’m 15 and I got in trouble at school. I “cut” a few classes and my parents found out. My problem is that they won’t let me do anything anymore. I have to report home after school and stay in on weekends. How can I make my folks see that I have learned my lesson? Locked-Up, Yuma, Ariz.

Sonny’s Response:

Dear Locked-Up, Have you tried telling them? It’s a funny thing, but almost everyone can recognize the truth. I f you really have “learned your lesson,” your parents should see that there is no reason for your punishment to continue. If they don’t try to see that your present situation is only temporary [then] use it to your advantage. Read, start a new project, find something you are interested in—but don’t waste your time feeling sorry for yourself!

Cher Scholar’s Response:

When I was a senior I talked two of my friends, Nellie and Craig, into going to McDonalds for lunch. This was not allowed. We were not supposed to leave campus during the day but Donna and I had been cutting study hall for a while as it was our last class and nobody had ever stopped us. Well, this time we were intercepted by security coming back.

Why did we come back? Because we were nerdy kids who didn’t cut actual classes.

As the security guy came over to us, my friends started to panic and I implored them to essentially lawyer-up. That did not happen. One of them was willing to turn bad, like I was, but the other one broke immediately into tears and confessions. But we got off without even a warning. That’s how bad we were at being bad.

Later that year I threw myself a birthday and graduation party at the Clarion hotel in downtown St. Louis. It took some subterfuge and adult role-playing to arrange it and I’m still amazed we pulled it off, quite frankly. I got into a lot of trouble at home myself, but not as much grief as my friend Rand got for coming. His mother grounded him for a year. A year. He said he didn’t regret it but I still feel guilty about that.

I, however, was ungroundable. My mother often mentioned that when you put televisions into your kid’s bedrooms, they become ungroundable. I never understood why she didn’t just take the TVs back out. They were portable after all. But that wouldn’t have made much difference, she said, because I was a reader and was happy enough to read all day and night. And she didn’t want to ground me from books.

Both Sonny and Cher got into trouble in high school. Sonny got suspended, according to Cher’s Sonny & Me documentary, for bringing an African American band to play at his school prom. Cher was in trouble for things like wearing sunglasses to class, according to her mother’s TV special Superstars and Their Moms. Both of them dropped out of high school before graduation and were definitely, in their own ways, ungroundable too.

Category: What This Really Says About Me (Page 1 of 16)

Reel Roots and Other Scary Things

Alive From New York…It’s Saturday Night

End of 2025 Catchup

Forever Fitness of the Heart and Mind

Wigs and Courage

The Square Sonny & Cher

Cher Scholar’s Deep Thoughts

Rock and Roll and Sex

Sonny and Leisure Music: The Importance of Music to Conceptual Mental Synthesis

Dear Sonny & Cher from 16 Magazine, Part 11

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