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Category: What This Really Says About Me (Page 2 of 15)

Memory and the Space Shuttle Challenger

Space Shuttle Challenger ExplosionThis started out as just one little story but it has tripled into three very tangentially related essays.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone in the library was upset just immediately then.

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

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

A stiff, rubber o-ring.

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least that’s how I remember it.

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

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

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

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

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

Second disaster quietly averted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deep thoughts, me.

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

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

Mary. Lillian, Diana, Kathy

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

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

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

Mary McCray hair

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

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

from me.

Obnoxious Pull Quote

God. Dammit!

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

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

L:-M Yearbook Page

Sigh. Ok. Enough of that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, I do not.

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

Proust and the Fan Squeal

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

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

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

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

It was great!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because bitch, please…

You should be a connoisseur not a sentimentalist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because I can.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ve Moved!

You try to tell newbs and naysayers about Cher one day and then 24 years of your life go by! It’s not okay. (It’s totally okay and I would do it all again.)

Our flagship site, Cherscholar.com, started in 1999 in my Yonkers apartment off Odell Avenue and it all began as a static spoof site. And look at us now! The spoof has swallowed us all up and we are now in our second content management system. 

My friend Julie encouraged me in 2006  to start a blog to go along with Cherscholar. At first I had no idea how to strike a balance between a personal blog and Cher discussions. But after some practice on another fan forum, I figured it out and started this intrepid little blog back on September 28, 2006. Unfortunately, back then I did not imagine the blog would last 16+ years or that I would have to lift it up and move it somewhere else. I would say that is something I probably should have known, web content being my day-job and all; but in my defense, content management systems were new back then and the perishability of services just seemed so…far away and unlikely.

And the really bad news is that I didn’t purchase a separate domain name for the blog. I’m fixing that now by attaching the blog to the parental cherscholar.com domain, but….big sigh….16+ years of incoming blog posts links to cherscholar.typepad.com/i_found_some_blog are about to break. Considering the prospect of almost losing 16+ years of deep Cher ponderings, I guess that’s a fair price.

I found out last October that Typepad was no longer accepting new bloggers, which translates to a ramped-down customer service and troubleshooting situation (you can’t pay folks when income’s not coming in). Then, when a server move resulted in weeks of broken site images and downtime, I saw the writing on the wall. But I was loathe to leave Typepad. I have very few complaints about them if any. They were easy to use and secure and their customer service was always great. Although very limited in site bling, their out-of-the-box features were far more customer-friendly than on WordPress where you have to build pretty much everything from plugins. (Want to include borders around your images? Well, you need a plugin for that. Want to link to Twitter? You’ll need a plugin. Don’t ask. You will need a plugin.)  But to WordPress’ credit, there’s a lot more bulk editing you can do site wide, so that’s good.

I had worked with WordPress at the Institute for American Indian Arts and at Central New Mexico Community College so I knew the learning curve with it and although I knew WordPress was the safest bet for future migrations, I still felt very loyal to Typepad and very, very lazy to do anything about the situation.

The timeline of the move looked like this:

  1. November: feeling sorry for myself, wishful thinking that Typepad would get bought out in the next month by another blogging service.
  2. December: dragging my feet to do anything and continued wishful thinking, backing up all my sites over Christmas break.
  3. January: begrudgingly researching my options.
  4. February: prepping the new environments, moving the two Cher sites, struggling with plugins.

Some of my angst I’m sure was not wanting to spend my private life doing my day job. And I don’t even hate my day job; I just don’t want to do it all the time.

Anyway, the new URL for the Cher Scholar blog, I Found Some Blog is https://cherscholar.com/cherblog/. Please update your bookmarks and forgive all the new brokenness.

Cher Funko Pop dollOh and image pop-ups will no longer work. So very sorry. I haven’t found the plugin for that. 

Sigh. 

Old stuff will look messy for a while (and there’s an issue with old comments.)

But as part of our lookback, I’d like to remind everyone this was the first title of my first legitimate I Found Some Blog post, “I’d Be a Superfan of Albert Goldbarth But There’s No Doll.”

Can I get an amen on that? The Funkos Pops are coming!

We’re Moving

It’s been a rocky year kids for reasons I can’t even begin to explain to you. But one of the final adversities this fall was the slow crashing of our dear webhost Typepad over the last three weeks, starting with their inability to display images on the site. Fortunately I was able to backup all (or most of) the many words but it’s been made clear by the downtime (and Typepad’s own homepage missive that they’re no longer taking new customers) that it’s time to move all the sites to more stable and supported pastures. That will take quite a bit of time and effort (and that’s after researching where we can even go). I don’t know if I’ll even be able to restore everything, but if not we can revisit old posts from time to time.

Brave new start.

So anyway I’ll be gone for a while which is kind of bummer considering I was within a shot put of finishing both the Cher TV shows and the Essay Project and was in the middle of a new set of Grammar poems.

The big irony here is that I had taken some time off blogging this fall (and off social media too, although I didn’t do as well with that). I had decided to just stop talking for a minute and start listening (but mostly just stop talking already). And when the weather changed last week I crafted some new posts about poets and madness, Cher's new Decades collection and a few other things that won’t see the light of day for a while.

Honestly, I’m one of the lucky ones in this hosting meltdown because at least I had most of my backups from 2007 and I’m not depending upon any of my words to eat. They’re provided free of charge. Since I’ve never felt this current life’s mission has been to make money or get ahead, I’m not suffering quite as much as some others at this time. (For anyone on Typepad who doesn’t have backups, try visiting archive.org, the Wayback Machine, and you can grab stuff there.) And Typepad most likely will stabilize again (fingers crossed) but this is a big wakeup call for us old-timers over there. And this whole experience just highlights how fragile an internet life can be and how it can all become destabilized and disappear overnight, just like Vint Cerf indicated all those many years ago when he warned us in a speech that a generation of intellectual property will probably be lost. Web companies come and go. The supports you take for granted can lose their way. It’s all part of the digital lifecycle.

It could be worse…always.

Which brings me back to my little goal of shutting up for five minutes. It might be longer than that. I will be taking this opportunity to watch one of my favorite movies, Into Great Silence. I will pretend to be a monk for a while until my little Chatty Cathy comes out again, which is inevitable.

In better news, ICANN has called everyone back into the office for the first time since they shut down in April of 2020. So oddly 2023 is feeling like what I expected 2020 was going to be. And that includes trips into the LA office starting January, during which I’ll see the Joan Didion exhibit at The Hammer Museum and will report back on that when the sites are all moved. This also means there will probably be no NaPoWriMo 2023 for me next year as I won’t likely be up and running by that time.

But there’s plenty of work for me offline and I hope to catch up with everyone down the line. I hope the rest of everyone’s year goes well and next year we can pick up with new books and fun Cher stuff. 

Starting on The Sonny & Cher Show and Misty Water-Colored Memories

DefaultI’ve started to work on the last leg of our major project. It’s hard to believe but I made the first post on the first Comedy Hour show all the way back on January 15, 2019! At this rate, I should be finished in late spring of next year (minus a sprinkling of TV specials we can do).

I’m actually happiest reviewing these post-divorce shows. These are the shows I remember watching in 1976 and 1977. After we moved to St. Louis from Albuquerque, our time zone changed and Sonny & Cher tv now fell after a pretty strict bedtime of 8 pm. At the time I petitioned for and was granted a weekly exception, an exception that lingered after the cancellation of the show and enabled me to watch Solid Gold every Friday night with the delightful Marilyn McCoo.

To watch Sonny & Cher, I would go back into my brother Andrew’s bedroom (I didn’t yet have a TV in my own room) to watch the show all alone. He had a little color portable green TV my mother once received as a work bonus. I remember the hour would go by incredibly fast. Sonny & Cher always looked so good, I thought.

This was also right around the time my family staged an intervention on my Cher obsession. It happened at the kitchen table one night (and this is going to turn shortly into a sentimental story about my Dad).

I recall sitting at the table while one of my brothers, my mother and  grandfather Stevens all tried to talk me out of liking Cher so much. My Dad was sitting at the far end of the table, but I don’t remember him saying a single word that night.

I do remember my mother telling me I shouldn’t like Cher because her teeth were crooked. And by the way, you can always ID an old Cher fan because we invariably say things like we prefer Cher’s old teeth. I’m sure I immediately dismissed this argument as beside the point. Then my grandfather said I didn’t even know what political party she belonged to!

This was not a surprising tactic on his part because he pretty much had his own two singular obsessions, (possibly this is a genetic problem), which were (1) extoling the greatness of British shipping history and (2) notifying anybody and everybody about the tragic demise of American labor unions. (As an aside, when he found out I was interested in poetry, he told me I should read the 1930s labor poets and I was like I don’t even know where I would find those people and he said go to the library and I said well, that’s not gonna happen. Fast-forward to today and I found those people and am reading them as we speak.)

But his suggestion that I know Cher’s political affiliation was completely disingenuous anyway because the current opening segment schtick for The Sonny & Cher Show was an argument about Cher supporting Jimmy Carter in the impending presidential election and Sonny still supporting Gerald Ford. This might even have been when Sonny “came out” as a conservative. My family should have known this. And in fact, Ford’s eventual loss to Carter was all the more misfortune in Sonny’s slow slide into the shadow of Cher’s phoenix-rising and his own impending designation as a “flash-in-the pan.”

But at that moment my only response to my grandfather was “I dunno” because I didn’t even know what the political parties were…and that was because I was seven years old.

Yes people, this all happened when I was seven!

So anyway, my Dad is sitting at the table conspicuously not saying anything during this completely shocking intervention and so this leads me into a story I’ve been meaning to tell for quite some time, (me wanting to tell it while my Dad is still with us).

So fast forward 33 years later and it’s my wedding. Now my Dad is not someone who wants to be doing anything in front of a crowd of people. So a speech from the father-of-the-bride was right away just not going to happen And honestly, a lot of the wedding traditions I felt very ambivalent about, but the one thing I had fantasized about for many, many years was the father-daughter dance. And I remember in early conversations my Dad was not wanting to do this. He kept saying he wasn’t a big dancer.

It took some working from my mother to convince him to even consider doing a father-daughter dance and even then there was a separate round of negotiations around what that song would be. My first choice was “Take It To the Limit” because my Dad was a late-adopting but relatively new fan of the Eagles and the song kind of reminded me of him in a distantly, Western kind of way. But then my brother Randy convinced him that the song was essentially a love song (an interpretation I still disagree with) but then as it turns out my Dad would never want me to ‘take it to the limit’ anyway so the whole thing was a moot point. Bad idea on my part. As was the, in hindsight, misguided suggestion to use Lee Ann Womak’s “I Hope You Dance.” There is probably not a single line in that song my Dad would agree with. Not a single line.

So after months of back and forth and finding nothing, I suggested the song “Turn Around” and I sent him Cher’s version with the caveat that I didn’t like it. I rather preferred the Harry Belafonte version or the version that was on that Kodak commercial in the 1960s. Unfortunately in 2009 other versions of the song were nowhere online or in new or used record stores that I scoured for weeks. And that ended up being a moot point too because my Dad said he was only interested in dancing to the Cher version. End stop.

I was surprised by this, kind of moved and also a little dismayed (it’s really not a great version; Cher’s barely had time to “turn around” herself). But that was just too bad, because that was the only song he would consider. And as I recall he still didn’t commit to anything fully until pretty much right before the event, the night before which we spent with my former-dance-teacher mother showing us a simple waltz.

0230_McCray-LoRes-WEB_20091114And we did the father-daughter dance to Cher singing “Turn Around” and it went off without a hitch.

Later, my wedding reception was basically a mix-tape project with the DJ and I organized slow-dance numbers in two-song blocks because haven’t we all been at weddings where you find yourself in the bathroom when a slow song comes up and by the time you find your date and drag him out to the dance floor it’s all over?

And I didn’t use many other Cher songs at the wedding. I used the instrumental version of “I Got You Babe” as part of the arrivals mix and a fun radio mix of “Song for the Lonely” as part of the dancing reception…

…and my favorite version of “I Got You Babe” during one of the slow-dance two-fers (the Westside Room version to which I edited out all of Sonny’s preambles because what poor guests need to hear that?).

And when that particular song started playing my own date was off hobnobbing with some of our guests and I was a little disappointed (missing a dance to “I Got You Babe” during my own wedding and all). But then I turned around and my Dad was standing there and he said, “I’ll dance this song with you.”

Oh my.

This was one of the unforgettable moments of my life, I have to tell you. I don’t even know why really. Probably it was his willingness to dance to this iconic Sonny & Cher song with me at that moment. To this day it gets me very verklempt. I mean after all the protracted negotiations about dancing at all and then the history of my family vis-à-vis the Cher thing. And now I cannot extricate my memory of my Dad and me dancing from this version of the song itself, which every time I hear it has come to mean a sort of moment of acceptance and connection. If I had to do it all over again, I would probably pick this song for the father-daughter dance in the first place. It was probably the real one, unbeknownst to anyone there, which is just like the most awesome thing.

 I mean.

The other slow song I paired with it was Wilco and Billy Bragg’s cover of Woody Guthrie's “California Stars,” a cover which my Dad really liked by then too and so…

 …we kept on dancing.

 

"Good night everybody. God bless you. Thank you for being so cool. Good night and thank you very much."

My Rick Springfield Story

Untitled design (2)This story came to mind recently after a few nice people wrote to me about the Partridge Family/Cher post a few weeks ago. One was a music writer from St. Louis and I enjoyed her pop-culture writings on Cher, Cream Magazine and a very funny piece on Rex Smith. I also liked how she incorporated a representative music link at the end of her commentaries. And she reminded me how my two older brothers, solidly in the 1970s, St. Louis KSHE-radio rock-music demographic, once mercilessly made fun of Rex Smith.

This was separate and apart from their ongoing pressure for me to alter my music plays in the house. And even though my first instinct was to resist their suggestions in this area, in a few cases their influence did affect me unawares.

In the first case, they ruined Barry Manilow’s song “Mandy” by telling me the then-popular rumor that the song was about a dog. The second instance involved Rex Smith when my brothers mocked his single “You Take My Breath Away” one day while we were in the family station wagon because the song was basically the same two sentences sung over and over again into perpetuity. I had to agree they had a point there.

There was also their general, unspoken disparagement of pretty boys in all cases, (especially light-haired ones), which must have seeped into my consciousness somehow and pretty much made impossible any crushes I could ever develop on Rex Smith, Leif Garrett, Sean Cassidy, Jimmy McNichol and pretty much anyone from Duran Duran.

But that was all academic because I was too late a bloomer for Mr. Rex Smith. And I really can’t emphasize that enough. I was a late, late, late bloomer.

Screenshot_20220723-194805I was a perfectly happy camper being a kid with my girlfriends roller skating and playing waitress or teacher or famous novelist. We had our salacious sexcapades with the Barbies; we had incredibly complex township soap operas improvised around the Fisher-Price army of Little People and their building structures. We had board games, books, restaurant menu design, newscasts, pirating.

But the biggest thing was the Fisher-Price and Tree Tots villages we would create in our basements by pooling together our buildings.

Screenshot_20220723-194821My friend Krissy was a year older than me and we played this way for years…until she “turned.” Darcey Steinke explains “turning” for girls very well in her novel Sister Golden Hair. Turning refers to the change from girlish kid-hood into the adolescent tweens. Girls turn overnight, Steinke explained, and this completely jives with my experience growing up. Girls pass from childhood to adolescence overnight like a flipped light switch whereas boys could take months if not years to evolve into their adolescence. I don’t know how it was for gay or trans kids. Possibly something in between. But for cisgender girls, the change was Twilight-Zone quick. One day a girl had a kid personality, the next day that kid disappeared and the same girls were like zombies solely intent on finding out where the boys were grazing. It was unnerving if you were a late bloomer, kind of like watching a 1950s horror movie.

ImagesKrissy was older and so her disappearance was expected to some degree, although because she was in a grade higher at school, I rarely saw her again after that. But for the girls in my own grade, the loss of a playmate was much more egregious and painful because we would still be friends at school. We just weren’t spending our free time in the same way anymore. It was a confusing kind of loss. And in the condescending way of girls who mature faster than others, my friends were patiently waiting for me to ‘catch up’.

Screenshot_20220723-072550Jane in our grade went next. Boy crazy we called her then because she was a statistical outlier. But then suddenly all the girls started falling like dominos!

I made an impassioned case to save them, too. I said things like,

“Hey listen, I have two boys in my house! And first of all, they smell…like bad!

Secondly, they’re obnoxiously immature for like forever and it will be another whole year before one will even be able to have a civilized conversation with you.

Screenshot_20220723-194618What’s the rush anyway? You have the rest of your life to suffer over boys!

Let’s play a game of Life!“

As you might imagine, my arguments fell flat.

I remember my very last Fisher-Price friend. Her name was Chris and she was one of the last girls to turn. She wasn’t interested in boys yet because she was a tomboy, which I was not. I was just clear-headed and probably psychic about the prospect of a lifetime of love-drama ahead. I was also to into dollhouses and stuffed animals to be a tomboy. And I had no interest in climbing anything. A few times I did swear to my Screenshot_20220723-194506father that I could be a tomboy for 48-hours in order to finagle an invitation to the boys-only camping trips. But no luck; he never bought it. Not once. (And thus, an adulthood of compensation-camping for me).  

In any case, I was always willing to caucus with the tomboys if it came to that. And I thought, “okay here is someone who beats up boys at recess! She’s good for another year with this Fisher-Price stuff…at least.”

Screenshot_20220723-194539Her father did very well at a local company and so she got presents on holidays like Valentine’s Day. She had so much stuff, she’d give it away frequently. All my Michael Jackson albums were bequeathed to me when she got a full replacement set like on like Washington’s Birthday or some other non-gifting holiday like that.

So of course all her toys was great. She lugged them all over to my basement one day, all her Fisher-Price buildings, the airport, the cottage, the farm and the Holiday Inn (which I didn’t even know existed). Those combined with my farmhouse and parking garage and we had quite a metropolis.

Screenshot_20220723-194439And we were having a swell time in my basement when two days later she calls and says she can’t make it over that day.

(No worries. Everything’s fine.)

But then I get the same call again the next day and then the next day; and I know what this means. I’ve been here many times before. She’s turned. She’s still friendly at school and willing to do all the adulting things she’s newly interested in; but she suddenly has no interest in being a kid anymore.

So we’re talking on the phone a few days later and I say, “By the way, you’re going to have to come over and pick up all your stuff or I can bring it over to your house or whatever.”

And this is what she says to me, (and it still breaks my little heart to this very day). She says,

“You can keep it.”

Ugh!!!

(Flash forward a few decades and my mother kept all that Fisher-Price stuff, both mine and everything Chris left behind, and was a very popular grandmother as a result. All my nieces and nephews loved those toys as much as I did. Even the neighbor kid would come over. It brings me some kind of mitigating joy to know those things had those subsequent lives.)

But anyway, I was adrift then because you couldn’t play with that stuff alone. You needed to bounce your imaginative stories off each other. So Chris’ kid-defection effectively and forcibly ended my career with Barbies and Fisher-Price people forever.

Kid-business just ceased to exist for these girls. Roller skating now had to happen at a disco roller rink where boys could be skated in front of. No more Nancy Drew. It was now standing around at the shopping mall in a cute outfit. (Which, by the way: you couldn’t pay me.)

Over the years I’ve thought a lot about this turning business and my being so tardy with it. It’s like each girl in my grade became possessed with another personality overnight, all the girls except the ones who were never going to turn, like the ones who turned out to be lesbians. Every other girl turned before I did. Actually, most of the boys turned before I did, too. That’s how late I was. And it was a lonely year as far as after-school was concerned. I watched a lot of TV.

I have this theory that Gen X girls in my grade all turned during a three-to-six-month period of time in the early 1980s. And it was like they woke up one morning and said, “Hey, I like boys today!” and then they all went to the record stores all over America and said, “Hey look! There’s a boy!” and then they all bought that same, damn Rick Springfield album.

My friend Krissy was a perfect example. She was completely following my influence in her record album purchases, however questionable they were. Slowly in the late 1970s, Cher and Johnny Cash albums were stacking up in her bedroom. And then out of the blue one day she makes a renegade purchase and I find the Rick Springfield album lying there on her bed.

And it was like any disparaging thing I could say about boys would just result in a moony gaze at the Rick Springfield album cover.

It’s important to note here that this was a completely different situation than years earlier when one of my friends would put on a Sean Cassidy or Jimmy McNichol 45 record as we kept on playing with the Fisher-Price stuff.

I was like goddamnit Rick Springfield; you are making this so much harder for me! It wasn’t his fault, I suppose. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone else. So it wasn’t personal exactly.

It was a little bit personal though.

Of course, I did turn eventually. One day in science class two of my girlfriends forcibly made me pick out some rando guy to “like.” And what seemed like a perfectly safe and perfunctory choice in the moment turned into rent garments pretty quickly. Within days, I was so predicably swept away I couldn’t even parcel out all the incredibly deserved “I told you sos” to all my friends.

And from that day that I turned, I have no clue where all that Fisher-Price junk in the basement got stored away because, for the love of god, all that ceased to exist and within days the basement was repurposed into a dance floor where I was dancing to The Pointer Sisters and songs like “Let the Music Play” while daydreaming about stupid rando boy. I had a bathroom now miraculously full of makeup and hairspray, was giving a shit about what I wore to school every day, and even stinky socks and asinine immaturity seemed mysteriously surmountable and even immaterial and now possibly (alarmingly) even part of the new appeal!

I think we can all look back at this time and clearly see I was totally right about all of it; and if Rick Springfield hadn’t enabled the complete Gen-X-Girl Turnover of 1981 & 2, I would have had a fighting chance in talking sense into those precocious, hormonally-hijacked young ladies.

The Rick Springfield thing isn’t personal. It’s just a little personal though.

StateoftheheartThis grievance of course doesn’t include the Italian Rick Springfield. He’s a total hottie.

 

And now…the closing Rick Springfield song.  
(I did buy this 45 single in 1985 so I couldn’t have been that mad at Rick Springfield.)

Friends of Friends of Dorothy (and a Missing Swimming Pool)

IMG_20220624_161519

Last weekend I spent time with two friends on a trip partially to visit the Georgia O'Keeffe house in Abiquiu, New Mexico, something we all had tried to do back in March of 2020 but the pandemic started that weekend and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum closed (which resulted in the creation of this thing).

This time we stayed at a guest ranch in Pojoaque, a place my family has been visiting for many years. Because I had been there before I was excited about taking a swim as soon as I arrived.

IMG_20220625_135413Crossing the grassy lawn in my swimmies, with a towel under my arm and a big coke in my hand, I suddenly came upon this:

IMG_20220625_135544
Missing pool. Alarmingly missing pool.IMG_20220625_140544

Ten minutes later, while I was taking a very angry shower, I kept thinking "what does this remind me of? This reminds me of something."

And that's when it occured to me the missing pool, among a few other things that had delapidated a bit at the guest ranch, (the trail to the river was blocked by an ominous barricade of tumbleweeds), were reminding me of Sonny & Cher's cartoon visit to their honeymoon hotel with Scooby Doo. You know, the scene where Sonny is listing off all the amenities of the place (pool, tennis courts) and the caretaker is telling them all those things no longer exist?

Brochure Brochure Brochure

 

 

 

 

Anyway, the guest ranch was not that bad but it was also not as good as previous visits either. Nevertheless, the weekend was beautiful; it rained most of the time through the cottonwoods and we hung out with peacocks, bullfrogs, goats, rabbits, burros and some very grumpy sheep while we had some deep conversations about life. We tried to feed the goats the day we left and they stole my friend's bowl from her hands and we had to stage a bowl rescue involving hanging her over the fence while the goats weren't looking. Good times.

IMG_20220626_104002 IMG_20220626_104002 IMG_20220626_104002

Glamour shots of one of the bowl thieves.

IMG_20220626_100456 IMG_20220626_100456 IMG_20220626_100456

 

 

 

 

 

Anyway, it just so happens my two friends are a gay couple and so we talked about recent (and possible upcoming) developments of the U.S. Supreme Court.

As a Cher fan, I have many gay men friends (and lesbian friends who are Cher fans too, as a matter of fact). Fag-hags was the derogatory term for us in the 80s. And all sorts of ideas proliferated about why we hung out with gay men, affection and shared interests never being part of the imaginative equations.

I was on a TV show once with a friend and many people thought we were depicted there as a gay couple there so Julie and I took to introducing the show to our new friends as Who Gets the Lesbians. (Edgar did. Edgar got the lesbians.) And although neither of us are gay, this never bothered me because it was actually more exciting than what was really going on in my life at the time; and if we had been gay, we would have been a very fun and interesting gay couple.

So for a long time I've been thinking about straight people in close relationships with gay friends. It should go without saying that having gay friends doesn’t mean you’re gay or on your way to being gay or that gay people are trying to turn you gay. Unfortunately, there are still folks out there who believe this.

SilkwoodAnd this all came up again last week when Cher tweeted a birthday wish to Meryl Streep and recalled the swing scene from Silkwood.

Although Silkwood is a very dry movie, (albeit one with an amazing cast), it's an unheralded example of a sweet relationship between straight and gay people. It depicts a very intimate and close relationship (one sometimes fraught with conflict) between Cher, who plays Dolly Pellicker, and Meryl, who plays Karen Silkwood, culminating very movingly in the swing scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDP_4UqslnQ

While I was at the guest ranch, I also came across this news story about someone else I'm a fan of, "Barry Manilow pauses Newcastle concert after 'rude' reaction to lyric." Even though Barry Manilow is a gay man, most if not all of his fans are straight women, even ones like me who knew Barry was gay long before he came out.

According to the story, Barry Manilow was singing "Weekend in New England," and as he was singing "when will our eyes meet/when can I touch you" the girls in the audience started to holler. 

The article states, "Looking slightly flustered, Barry was momentarily speechless, before letting out a little chuckle and commenting: 'My hands are busy now!'"

If you watch the video, the aforementioned pause is miniscule, the rudeness is questionable and the comeback is quick.

Barrymanilow

Barry is used to the sexual innuendos in his shows. The Concert at Blenheim Palace in 1983 is a good example of the Barry tease and screaming girls. I watched it recently in 'slight' amazement that it worked so well considering didn't half of us know he was gay? His repartee was full of double entendres and the girls sounded like they were losing their minds while their boyfriends sat there stoically trying to go to their happy places.

In "Weekend New England" most people miss the obvious sexuality and Barry performs the climax more lustfully than he gets credit for, which I assume is because he's become a performer most people assume has no sexuality. We love to rob people who are different or 'square' or a bit goofy of their sexuality.

“When will this strong yearning end…I feel brave and daring/I feel my blood flow."

Where did you think the blood was flowing?

It doesn’t matter that he’s now an outed gay man singing these lines to straight women. If Barry Manilow was caught off guard or flustered in Newcastle, (which I'm not convinced he was), maybe this was because he wasn't still expecting the straight reaction to his performance because it was occurring after he was outed; but the 'lewd' responses are still happening like clockwork.

And Barry Manilow is still responding with his old-school retorts. It's the very same thing, straight people in relationships with gay people and joking about sex and it gives me deep joy.

The Cherished Experience

CherishedLet’s just say you’ll never catch me saying any Cher album is a bad one. I just wouldn't do it. Of course there are ones I like better than others. But they all have something interesting to offer. I will say, somewhat lovingly, that this just might just be an album only an 8 year old would adore. And did. As did my other 8-9 year old compadres. My friend Krissy even bought her own copy and we would act out all the songs. So this is the only Cher album that has a sort of communal feel for me. The others were all very solitary pleasures. And hearing it now reminds me of all the tactile sensations of the late 1970s right down to the carpets and the couch fabric of our living room and Krissy bedroom stereo. At the time it was the most contemporary album of narrative songs from Cher we had and the stories really appealed to us.

This album also has the beautifully lush Harry Langdon photograph flowing from front cover to back. Cher wears jeans and a suede Native-American vest, which could also be read as shipwrecked-wench. The backdrop and makeup are glamourous yet earthy. Very Crystal Gayle. This is Cher's new, post-Elijah physique (a bit more fleshy as she admitted it was harder to lose weight this time). Her name is not on the cover because the title is a play on her name. "Pirate" was released as a single and it stalled at #93. "War Paint Soft Feathers" was also a non-charting single. Which is probably a fortunate failure in hindsight.

This is also the first album that referenced the Cher’s Friends fan-club in the liner notes. More on that below. You can believe that Cher didn’t like this album much because it's lacking in any personal liner notes. There are no thank-yous, no musician credits. Nada.

And this is an album about Los Angeles in many ways. There are lots of references to flying home to LA and recording and movie studios.

My love will only chain you down
The lead song "Prirate" is yet another Cher song about a man who knocks you up and then leaves town. Like similar Cher songs, the scandalous unwed-mother plot-point is revealed in the final verse. It all takes place in Biscayne Bay in Miami, we imagine, before it was so developed and urban.

The pirate is a perfect metaphor for the traveling lover but this is not Snuff Garrett at his best. A lot of these songs sound like demos, although Garrett does capture a genre here with the strings, the squawking birds and the squeezebox-sounding thing. The lyric is a mouthful if you're 8-years old and trying to sing "dark and handsome in his own way." But the song does evoke "the wind and waves and sea."

To act out the song, Krissy and I threw ourselves against our neighbor's hill (he was an Holocaust survivor) after an imaginary shipwreck and we survived on the desert island that was the tree near by backyard fence. We trucked out Krissy's little table and chairs and even our little kitchen dishes to enjoy the finer things on our imaginary island. I would have brought out my aluminum fridge but even we thought that was a bit much.

You have to admit the song is full of swirling, swarthy drama and Cher totally sells it.

The crowd made the magic happen; the band made the music play
This is a perfect lyric for a semicolon and these lines have been an earworm in my head since I started listening to the "He Was Beautiful" remaster. I loved the melody of this song and these were ballads little girls could enjoy. It’s a one-night stand story but like the man referenced in the song, Gregg Allman had long, golden hair. “The pale light of the morning sun./His golden hair had come undone so beautiful./He touched me with his fingertips,/bending close I kiss his lips so beautiful.” Due to various cues in the lyric, I’ve always thought this song was originally written about a woman and Cher turned in inside out.

Krissy and I didn’t enact this song. Well, maybe we did the "spinning around" thing; we were under 10 and very literal.

He was stealing her father’s horses when he saw her standing there
What can I say about "War Paint and Soft Feathers"? We loved this one. It was so easy to perform. An Apache and a Cherokee couple hooking up in another illicit love story. But it's hard to get your historical head around the scenario. When exactly does it take place, pre-Columbus? During manifest destiny? Last week? We don’t know. But in our little St. Louis-imaginations, it was pre-Columbian. And even then Father's didn't approve and haters-gotta-hate.

The girl was also a blue-eyed Cherokee which complicates our theories. And there are lots of unfortunate stereotypes in this song: the chants, the reference to speaking tongues and crossed spears, eagles soaring above, the drumming. A lot had changed from 1973 to 1977…and to now.

But aside from these unfortunate stereotypical tropes, this is a sweet love story, a love across warring tribes that was "meant to be."  The lines themselves are very evocative: "moon-braided bits of silver all through her long black hair" and  "Now the leaves have fallen to the ground over and over again,/from a small oak tree grown taller/where once crossed spears had been./A young man rides his pinto horse and he stands there tall and free…"

A baby is again revealed in the last verse. My friend loved horses and a pinto horse was a very romantic idea in the 1970s; so yes, this song was big in our creative imaginations, although I am 100% sure we did not know that “doin’ what tribal laws forbid” meant sex and that we totally missed the innuendo of “his drums broke the silence of the night.” The song feels like a PC fail today; and by 1977, cashing in on Cher’s Indian-ness was a cynical move, but the lyrics are well written if you can overlook that buffalo in the room.

As sure as the stars shine above you this angel
I’m sure all of these songs got into my head at a very critical juncture in the formulation of my ideas about relationships with boys. And this song, "Love the Devil Out of Ya," was a big difference of opinion between me and Krissy. As memory serves, Krissy loved this song. I was much more ambivalent about it. I guess she saw herself more as a “sure as a stars shine above you this angel" than I did. I felt the song was a bit too much…accommodating. I guess that says something about me. But the song is thankfully short, just two minutes of loving the devil out of you. Which is good because that’s totally not my job! 

Everything she lives and breathes is written on an album sleeve
The Peter Allen classic "She Loves to Hear the Music" is probably my favorite song on the album. I would go on to love many Peter Allen songs but this and Melissa Manchester's "Don’t Cry Out Loud" were my first exposure. Surely I internalized the "Years will not be kind to her" too. This production isn’t much to make over and is in fact confusingly Romani-sounding for an LA recording studio story. But as kids, we loved the song even though there wasn’t much besides secretarial duties for us to perform. We did glamourize the job, as we did teacher, waitress, newscaster, book author and sea-faring explorer.

But all I saw were unfamiliar faces in the rain
All I can say is there’s no Liberace piano flourish whenever I book a plane reservation to Los Angeles.

We also loved "L.A. Plane, but the song strikes me as odd duck today with the horns, maracas and strings, which I guess is all supposed to sound international. She's looking for excitement on boats and trains and unfamiliar faces but, in the end, she's "tired of the pouring rain,/tired of just passing through." She wants a "Southern Californian morning where I was born./ Babe, I’m coming home to you." This is Cher as rock-and-roll man again (see “Long Distance Love Affair” from 1976), almost barely autobiographical in how Cher considers LA as "home" and was apart frequently apart from Gregg Allman due to work. Krissy and I would literally mime taking off like a plane. I kid you not. 

I don’t know quite what to say
"Again" is other ballad. We really liked it although it feels like a big sleeper today. Lots of vowels working here. It sounds Pop Goes the Country with that guitar mashing up with the horns and piano. (They hired a piano player and goddammit they were gonna get their money’s worth!) I think we liked this lighter singing, lovesick Cher. If we enacted anything here it was torch singer, which never failed to please.

Does the Mississippi still run free?
Actually, yes it does. Thanks for asking. "Dixie," not to be confused with 1974's "Dixie Girl," was the southern part of our schtick. "New York’s too big a city for me!…I’m gonna make you feel like a hell of a man." That bit about the Mississippi felt so local. And we even had "the sweet magnolia blossoms" in our own backyard. But even this song feels Hollywood somehow. It's the rough draft of songs like "Midnight Train to Georgia" and “Please Come to Boston.”

Just an interested gentleman caller
Although the music is way too pleasant for the subject matter, we loooved "Send the Man Over." It was so sordid and adult like a bodice-ripping paperback novel. We totally knew what was going on, a man coming up to her room with “script and the cash.” One of us had to be the guy with the script and the other this sad yet hopeful, on-the-skids actress. "I know an actress has to make sacrifices,/but what a price to pay.” Can you believe NBC got a callout from a CBS girl? This is another mixed-race runaway too (like "Half Breed" and the gal from "War Paint Soft Feathers"). And like "We picked up a boy just south of Mobile" in "Gypsys, Tramps and Thieves," here we have "a Georgia drifter came/and we made it to LA."

I loved the part where Cher says with plaintive innocence, “You say there’s nothing today?” It was the first time since the cancelled TV show that I heard Cher’s speaking voice and it sounded so high, such a perfect counterpoint to her singing voice. Cher-as-actress was such a novel idea back then. "Hopefully Cher herself will escape this fate now that she’s trying to become a serious actress." Imagine Robert Altman or Mike Nichols even trying this shit with Cher. What a performance of innocence, this song! "A young actress must give her all,/pay her dues, play her role.”

Those footsteps in the hall of that dingy room above the Hollywood bar! So tense and scary. What will happen next?

I swear I heard the north wind call your name
I can barely ever even remember "Thunderstorm" every time I hear it. The song feels like the typical 1970s glam-country sound that was in vogue at the time. The deep background vocals are pure Olivia Newton John backup singer from "Let Me Be There." We get more thunder and lightning in this song, situating it with I’d Rather Believe In You's "Knock on Wood" and the upcoming Allman and Woman' song "I  Love Makin' Love to You." Okay, we get it. Sex with Gregg Allman is like lightning and thunder. Electric, stormy, lethal. Love as tornado chasing. TMI.

I’d love to know who played on this album. There are lots of good photos from album shoot. (Click to enlarge.)

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And that’s not all. This was the first Cher solo album tempting us all into the official fan club, Cher's Friends. I found the album at our local Styx, Bear & Fuller department store in 1978 and I already felt way behind the curve on joining up. But I immediately wrote out a letter for my mom to post and received this missive back (note the postmark):

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I cut out the application form (as you can see) and sent in my five bucks (or at least believed my mother mailed the cash). But nothing ever arrived back. I kept the order form as a reminder to keep waiting. 

So when I joined eBay in 1998ish and an elderly gentleman posted the fan club packet for sale, I won the auction for 35 bucks. And then again, nothing came. (And back then eBay didn’t reimburse you; it was all buyer beware.) Lots of us got “scammed” by this fellow but then someone sent around an email to all his buyers (you could do that back then) saying he had passed away and his widow wasn’t willing or able to finish doing his eBay business. Sigh. I chalked it up to a donation to funeral expenses. Then I waited another year or two and another fan club packet popped up and I did receive this one with the following items.

A cool folder, a welcome letter, a poster.

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A biography booklet, some pictures, a quiz and two very conspicuous textbook-covers.

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The bio had a very short discography on the back. There was also a reprint of the 1975 Time Magazine article with a special note from the publisher on the back.

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Other fans had received these additional items which were not in my initiation folder (stationary and a club card).

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And without the card, I feel so unofficial right now.

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

13

Re-Releases!

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

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

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

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

Sonny Bono Dinner Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perfect Pork Chops (Correction)

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

Cher in Vogue

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

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

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

Stinky Cher Words

Review"It hugs my body and caresses my soul"

This is the subject line of the latest email from Scent Beauty on Cher's Eau de Couture. "It gives me peace and comforts me. It makes me happy and gives me strength."

I'm all for aroma therapy but this ad sounds like we're pitching a magic, superfine, sunshine elixir!

"Now gather round folks. I heard you say you wanna pick-me-up that won't let you down. You're looking for a cure?….It's gotta relieve your sore bones, your aching tones and your runny nose!"

It's a good scent. But it does not exactly 'caress my soul.' In fact, this advance on my soul is not required from my beauty products. 

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My mom recently sent us boxes of keepsakes from our childhood, including art attempts, grades, our birth announcements… all that stuff. I've slowly been working through it. I can only take small amounts of my little-shit self so I have no idea how my mom put up with me. As the budding writer in the family, there are copious amounts of notes requesting sleepovers with Krissy (who lived behind us) and petitions to redress unfairnesses unspecified. 

The above letter was written on clown stationary and I had a vague memory today of covering it with the balloon stickers it came with. The letter starts by introducing myself to my mother (in case she doesn't remember me) and then launching into my Christmas wish list, which includes the overbearing request depicted above for "a sher doll" and a dog and a cat. I go on to concede that a cat is unlikely (some of us were allergic), but this was probably just a negotiating tactic on my part to leave room for bargaining down to the doll and the dog. I proceed to explain to her how much I like her and then attempt to illicit from her some positive feelings toward myself. 

I have to report the scheme worked as I did get 'a sher doll' that year. And Sonny too. But we already had a dog and I didn't get another one. 

Which is all to say I've been a fan since before I could spell Cher, which makes my appreciation almost pre-verbal. Almost. Clearly, I already had a very big mouth. 

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