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Dear Sonny & Cher from 16 Magazine, Part 12

September 27, 2024 / Cher Scholar / 2 Comments

So we had a bit of an unplanned break in finishing these Dear Sonny & Cher from 16 Magazine. I was hoping this would be a fun summertime project but we may not even finish them this year. We have two left after this one but a lot going on including a shit storm of a year, (I keep thinking things will get better every New Years Eve and somehow…)

But we continue on. Maybe Sonny & Cher will have some advice on the existential crisis. Fingers crossed.

I have to say, in the interim of August I finished Susan Dey’s guide to womanly perfection and it was much better than I was initially making it out to be. Only two things haunt the book in hindsight: the chapter on boys seems all the more tragic when you figure in Susan Dey’s ill-fated crush on David Cassidy and how that all turned out. Secondly, in the dieting chapter Dey admits (in almost a side-comment) that people are telling her she’s not eating enough. Alarm bells went off there, (as a drunk knows a fellow drunk), and so I researched her life and, yes, she did suffer from anorexia during the time of the book’s writing. Which is terrible and my sympathies to Susan Day for going through that.

But that does put all the dieting advice under suspicion. But the good thing about the book was that it wasn’t didactic, after you got past the boys chapter anyway, and there was some good, simple advice in there: haircuts for face shapes, how to make conversation at parties. My book had “Amy H—” handwritten in pencil in the inside cover and I sincerely hope she wasn’t ruined by it. God speed, Amy H—-. We are sisters in the journey.

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 question 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.

NOSEY

Dear Cher, Help! I’ve got a serious problem. I have a big nose! I’m dead self-conscious about it. My figure is fine—I get whistles when I walk down the street. It’s just this nose of mine that makes me blue. How can I cure these self-conscious feelings? Mary, Wickliffe, Ohio

Cher’s Response:

Dear Mary, [Eeee! It’s like this letter is to to me!}, It seems to me that your problem isn’t quite as serious as you think! Having a big nose hasn’t stopped quite a few stars from making a go of it! Barbra Streisand is a prime example—and so is Sonny! Sonny found that when he felt self-conscious about his nose, people seemed to be more aware of it. The minute he accepted it as part of himself, no one ever made a bad remark again! Accept your nose as an unchangeable part of you—because it is—and forget about it! I think you’ll find that other people will too.

Cher Scholar’s Response:

That is a good answer but nobody wants to be a butterface. I don’t think even Sonny and Cher followed their own advice here.

To be honest, I have met very few people who like their faces. Even people with beautiful faces! Perception is an absurd thing. And a nose, let’s be honest, is a weird thing, just a bizarre-looking thing on any face no matter how culturally acceptable that particular nose may be. Can we all agree on that?

The nose would become a prominent part of Sonny & Cher schnoz schtick. In the 1960s, it was Sonny who was perceived as the big-nosed one. By the time The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour went on the air, the routine had Sonny making fun of Cher’s nose.

This was all perceived as fun and games until Cher saw her face on a big screen and agreed that there was too much nose there. She then fixed her nose and her teeth, which did change the look of her face. Both faces are fine. Cher’s old nose was fine.

And although Sonny never did come out as having a nose job, many fans believe he did by the end of the 1960s, somewhere around the time he stared wearing a mustache.

At the end of the day, if both Sonny and Cher got nose jobs, we have to take this advice here with a grain of salt. Another case of someone standing their ground before capitulating.

Check out those noses!

SELFISH

Dear Cher, I am 13 years old and I like this boy—natch! The problem is that my nextdoor neighbor likes him too! When he liked her, she dropped him fast—then I began to like him. Now I like him very much, but she likes him again. What should I do—back out or fight? Confused, New York City

Cher’s Response:

Dear Confused, Fight, of course. Your next door neighbor sounds like she is never satisfied with the things she has, but can’t stand to have anyone else have them. These people are very easy to beat. You can’t lose, because if you back out she will drop him again. Have you considered talking it over with the boy? How does he feel about it? If he is still “carrying a torch” for your neighbor, your fight will be a little tougher. Just keep in mind that she doesn’t want him—she just doesn’t want you to have him!

Cher Scholar’s Response:

First of all, I can’t believe they were saying “natch” way back when. Secondly, we’re assuming a lot about this neighbor.

I think the “fight” advice is problematic, to be honest. We’ll get to that later. But talking it over with the boy sounds like a sound solution. When two or more people like one person, it’s really up to that one person at that point. Think of it the other way around, two boys after a girl. They think they’re in competition with each other, (I learned this on a Facebook reel recently), but they’re not. And fighting each other over a girl is…well, kind of sexist because it assumes the girl will chose the winner of a duel instead of having feelings and opinions of her own about the two boys. And if that’s true for some of us, it’s true for all of us. So skip the duel. The boy has to choose. Well, I guess he doesn’t have to but if he goes that way, you have your answer: he doesn’t care for either of you all that much and is making the most of the situation.

Cher did hang on despite the fact that there were others interested in Sonny and it resulted in a lot of pain for her. But also a megastar career. That’s not likely (or even advisable) for the rest of us. Who knows what kind of competition she was facing but it was ultimately Sonny’s decision. And he made one…kind of.

GOODY-GOODY

Dear Cher, My problem is that I don’t have any friends. I know quite a lot of people, but nobody talks to me at school. I even walk home alone. Someone told me it’s because I’m too good. I get all A’s in school and everybody think I’m a “square.” What can I do? Gertrude, Newark, N.J.

Cher’s Response:

Dear Gertrude, Being intelligent is a lonely road at times. It seems that most people want you to conform to their way of thinking. Would they like you better if you failed subjects, cut classes and acted like they did? [Yes, I think that’s what she is saying.] Would you like to be just like they want you to be—and not like you are? [Are we reading the same letter?] I hope not. Getting A’s on your report card is not as easy thing to do, or you would not be called too good. You can find friends among the other “squares” in school—and when you do, you may find out who the real “squares” are.

Cher Scholar’s Response:

Well, I guess it’s time to start playing dumb. I’ve seen it work.

Just kidding. This is good advice. Find the squares pronto. They are up to some weird shit that is very interesting. I was just talking about this at dinner last night with a friend of mine. The cool kids, the popular kids: they have it too easy and therefore have no creative problems-solving skills. Not to say the square kids have that yet either but they’re trying out things. They’re forced to. And it’s a lot less boring over there, I tell you what.

Some genius (and in some cases, infamously dangerous) eccentrics (I mean nerds) in Cher’s life:

PEST

Dear Sonny, There is a girl who digs me so much—it’s icky. I just can’t stand her. My friends kid me because she is always hanging around. Please, give me some pointers on how to shake this bird! Bugged, Newport Beach, Calif.

Sonny’s Response:

Dear Bugged, Tell the truth! It sounds like she is not easily shaken. If she is not aware by now that you are not interested, it won’t do you any good to ignore her. Take the time to really talk to her, and tell her in the nicest way you know how that you are just not interested. Be honest—but be kind. Remember, if you leave her a thread of hope—she’ll hang on!

Cher Scholar’s Response:

So here is where the “fight” advice hits a wall. And these are he kinds of mixed messages the lovelorn often get: make it happen…but just short of stalking. There’s a wide and confusing berth there. Hard to dock.

Talking it out is the best advice and so Sonny is right in this case. And Sonny was fending off more women than we would assume from his caricatured-self on the variety shows. He was a famous pop and TV star. Truly, he could have probably done more fending off but ultimately this is what pushed Cher to go it alone. People also under-assume how risky that felt at the time for her and Sonny exacerbated that fear and risk by telling her America would hate her for leaving him and it would ruin both of their careers. And Cher believed everything Sonny said about that sort of thing so…

Cher had to figure out the adage you want them, you don’t need them. Which she famously did by the time she called men a luxury and not a necessity. Cher was able to run her career (or at least put together the entourage) for herself.

This is all to say Cher flew on and this bird can too.

This is Cher putting on her big-girl pants…(or something like that):

SHY-GUY?

Dear Sonny, I met a boy a few weeks ago at a dance. He acted very nice toward me and we really had a good time. Now, I see him every day in school and he doesn’t even say “hello.” He stares at me a lot, but he never talks to me. Could it be because I’m a year younger than he is. Miss Fortune, Scranton, Pa.

Sonny’s Response:

Dear Miss Fortune, I don’t think age has a thing to do with it. It sounds to me like this boy is a little shy. It’s not too hard for a shy-guy to talk to a girl at dances, [Why is that? Is there booze?] if he’s gotten over the hurdle of asking for the first dance. Once you begin to dance, it is harder not to talk. But back at the old schoolyard, it can be a lot tougher. Why sit around waiting for him to say “hello” to you? Act friendly, smile—and then say “hello” to him. He sounds like he needs a little encouragement. It talkes two to tango!

Cher Scholar’s Response:

This is assuming a lot, Sonny. People can lose interest after a dance. And staring is not evidence of feeling. Like I said weeks ago, it could mean a lot of things, like you look ridiculous and the staring party is incredulous.

Cher has often said she struggles with shyness too. But she also often laments that men are afraid to ask her out on dates due to her Cherness. I’m also sure Cher fends off unwanted offers quite a bit. Fame is a power-structure that’s often difficult to negotiate.

But for a lot of these questions you can answer “it takes two to tango.” Two people have to show up. People are closed or open in a plethora of ways. Some are closed at the onset, some are closed to anything really deep, some are closed around a few secrets.

There is no intimacy without vulnerability. There are also no first dates without vulnerability either. So talking on the “hello” duties might not be nearly enough. You can’t always get the horse to the water sometimes (let alone the drinking of it)…and you could become miserable trying.

Shy-guy has to figure it out.

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.

Cher’s Hawaiian Meatballs

August 26, 2024 / Cher Scholar / 2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

Ingredients

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

Instructions

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

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

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

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

My poorly packed meatballs:

Mr. Cher Scholar’s better meatballs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more Cher food stories:

Stealing Fandom

August 26, 2024 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Little sisters, am I right?

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

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

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

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

Sonny & Cher Live in 1972

August 23, 2024 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

So last week Cher scholar Michael sent me an essay that somebody published which was basically a strategy paper for the later-day variety show of Sonny & Cher. Not a paper from 1978. A paper from 2024. Which is shocking in itself, as Cher scholar Michael pointed out.

There were a few issues with the brief paper, including no specific examples, certain factual inaccuracies around the timing of Nelsen ratings, a lack of understanding the show’s then-significance on women, a seeming lack of correctly reading the second variety show’s tone and themes of humor and, most interesting, the suggestion that writers of the second show should play off Cher’s singlehood, an idea which exposed the possibility that the paper’s author had not seen Cher’s interim solo show on CBS or knew about her new marriage to Gregg Allman and subsequent pregnancy during the second show.

But then again, this is deep-fan knowledge these days. Even people who saw the show on live TV have all but forgotten those scandalous details, although they were public enough at the time to make jokes about on the show. I chalk this up to the gravitational force of Sonny & Cher. What rockstar romance could compete?

But seriously, I am always surprised that the general public does not know about Cher’s second marriage to Gregg Allman or that she has a second son. It reminds me of my own surprise upon learning that Elizabeth Taylor had any children. It’s like if you don’t hear from a celebrity’s offspring either doing very well or very poorly or writing a tell-all book about their childhoods, they don’t seem to exist in the somewhat-fictional star-o-sphere.

But anyway, the paper did have a gem. It included an image of this 1972 Sonny and Cher concert review. Scholar-score! I’m going to type out the full review here because it illustrates how big Sonny & Cher were in 1972 and how different the assessment was then of Cher’s talent. For some reason, she was less of a target when she was married and more of a target when she was a solo artist. We should think on that for a bit.

Sonny, Cher Pack Arena by Mike Kalina
from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 16, 1972

A capacity Civic Arena crowd last night was treated to a lion’s “Cher” of music as Mr. and Mrs. Bono—also known as Sonny & Cher—performed in a concert in which the distaff side of singing team radiated throughout.

Sonny and Cher opened their act with “All I Ever Need Is You” and proceeded to do most of the hits that made them famous including “The Beat Goes On,” “I Got You Babe,” and “A Cowboy’s Work Is Never Done.”

Sonny’s only solo was “You Better Sit Down Kids” which originally was a hit when Cher recorded it in the late 60s. Among the numbers Cher soloed on were “Gypsys Tramps and Thieves” and “The Way of Love.”

In all her numbers, Cher showed off her surprisingly powerful voice which also can convey great warmth and feeling. Other numbers were the Nilsson hit “Without You,” “Rainy Day Feeling,” “United We Stand” and “the Carole King tune, “You’ve Got a Friend.”

Although Cher is clearly the stronger of the two vocally, she never overly-dominated the performance as a good wife shouldn’t. [Oh boy.] Both projected warmth to the audience in not only their numbers but also in their brief chats with the crowd before the songs.The couple interspersed their numbers with comedy patter, much in the same vein as the routines they do on television. I think a lot of the jokes that they did, all of which I had heard them do before, took up a little too much time, which could more judiciously have been spent singing.

[A recent comic was discussing this situation on a TikTok reel the perishability of jokes in contrast to the robustness of older songs in a music set. There’s a pressure to produce new jokes in comedy, alternatively to play old songs in pop and rock shows. I could see how this might put pressure on an act that does both, like the Smothers Brothers or Flight of the Conchords or Sonny & Cher.]

Two songs they weren’t able to fit into the show were “Living in a House Divided” and “When You Say Love” both of which are big sellers now.

[I am surprised those songs were big enough hits to warrant a note about a review missing them; but it’s also interesting to see that Sonny & Cher weren’t pushing their hits on the record shelves.]

The crowd was estimated at 14,200, a record for the Arena which previously had been held by the recent show here by the Rolling Stones.

[Ok, let’s mention that again for those watching from any Halls of Fames: Sonny & Cher broke the arena record set by the Rolling Stones in Pittsburgh. in 1972.]

Sonny and Cher previously had appeared at the Arena in 1966 but their popularity was not nearly as great as it is today. In a pre-concert interview they both agreed that they owed a lot of their current fame to their television program. Also, they said that their act today has more of a general appeal than it did when they played the Arena the last time when their records were the only thing they had going for them.

Backstage the superstar couple was very pleasant with reporters and gave a rather candid interview which touched on the high—and low—points of their career. They also posed for photos and signed autographs not as though it was a chore, as many stars give the impression, but as if they enjoyed it.

Opening the show was bright young comedian David Brenner, who is familiar to viewers of the Johnny Carson show. Brenner said that several years ago his career was given a big shot in the arm by an engagement at the Civic Arena which opened up a lot of doors to future concert dates.

“I owe a lot to this place,” he said.

Just eight years later People magazine will note “Cher’s shallow talents,” a comment the likes of which we would see throughout the next few decades for her shows and records. In fact, I don’t think she ever received a good review from Entertainment Weekly ever. This 1972 review also illustrates why Cher may have wanted to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as Sonny & Cher and not just as a solo act because we often forget that this duo did break some records, too.

Here is another set of two reviews from March 1972 in Fort Wayne, Indiana (with photos) and a photo snippet from September of 1972 where Steve Martin opened for them in Memphis:

Dear Sonny & Cher from 16 Magazine, Part 10

August 20, 2024 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cher’s Response:

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

Cher Scholar’s Response:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cher’s Response:

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

Cher Scholar’s Response:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cher’s Response:

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

Cher Scholar’s Response:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sonny’s Response:

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

Cher Scholar’s Response:

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

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

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

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

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

Sonny’s Response:

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

Cher Scholar’s Response:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Sonny & Cher from 16 Magazine, Part 9

August 13, 2024 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

Oh boy. I was feeling pretty good this weekend thinking we had only two more advice columns to review after this one. The questions about boys have been trying on my soul, especially this week’s responses from Sonny. Add to that the reading of the Susan Dey advice book, which is a nightmare of conflicting and problematic guidance for girls. Alarming warnings are made to not under any circumstances “chase” and then soon after there’s a chapter called “Chasing.”

It’s rough and I don’t know if I can make it through it. In fact, I’d put Susan Dey’s book right up there as one of the more difficult books I’ve ever read.

I’ve been complaining about these depressing time-capsules of dating advice to a few people and I hear in response the same thing: “That was a different time, Mary.” And I get that. Times have changed. And yet we are now hearing ever-louder calls for a return to this “quaintness” (from the Chief’s kicker, J.D. Vance, a whole slew of creepy people on Twitter/X). So…I don’t know. I still don’t feel like I’m on steady ground here as a girl. And I get a bit anxious just reading this shit.

This week I kept thinking thank God (thank God!!) I learned everything about boys and dating from John Hughes movies instead of columns and books like these. At least Jennifer Grey was allowed to be surly in Uncle Buck; and Molly Ringwald was allowed to be confused and critical in all of the John Hughes movies she was in. I can’t tell you how helpful that was to a confused person such as myself. That you could be just a normal person, not super feminine (see below) and the boys didn’t have to be “alphas.” In fact, those kinds of boys were played very villainously by actors like James Spader. Thank God also for the somewhat gender-fluid 1980s where boys could wear eye-liner and girls could have bi-lateral, funky hair. You had the freedom to explore ways of being. And maybe people were freaking out about it then, too, but those freak-outs were just off our radar screens.

Anyway, I was so happy to see the finish line with these old pressures of bad flirting and then I went into the Chersonian Institute (a.k.a. the Cher She-shed) this weekend and found two more lost columns! Eek! And one was compromised, so I went online afterwards to find a better copy and found another two more!!! Ack! So now we have six more to do instead of two. Oy vey.

So let’s keep going. I like the landscape photograph in this week’s column because I like to imagine Sonny and Cher are pondering over these letters and the weight of their responsibility in answering them.

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

Sonny and I are back again, reading your letters, answering as many as possible, and (hopefully) helping you to solve the problems you encounter in your day-to-day life. If your letter is not here, please don’t feel neglected—there just is not enough room in 16 to answer all of the many letters we get every month. Sonny and I carefully select a cross-section of the mail [see them cross-sectioning above] that represents your most important problems. If your questions aren’t answered this month, please come back next month—for sooner or later you will find your problem and our advice right here in 16 Magazine.

Dear Cher, I don’t like the way I look and I want to do something about it. What should I do to change my looks and become a new me? Waiting, Charleston, S.C.

Cher’s Response:

Dear Waiting, I think it’s very exciting to do yourself over from head to toe once in a while. The first thing you should do is get a bunch of hair styling and beauty magazines (or, better yet, order 16’s Popularity and Beauty Book—see the ad on the following page). When you have gathered together all of these magazines, scan through them and try to find your type. Study all the types for people with a face shaped like yours. Are you round, oval or square? Magazines dealing with make-up and beauty tips cover all types. The hair magazines have setting and comb-out instructions for all lengths and colors of hair. The hair books also tell you how to correct faults—like if your hair is too curly, what to do, etc. [Just wait until the 1980s]. Try to get a girlfriend to join you in your campaign to re-do yourself. It is always more fun when you have someone to share your thoughts with and to exchange ideas with. The two of you could spend a “beauty weekend” together and probably come out with some great new results. Good luck.

Cher Scholar’s Response:

I got really into my local library’s coffee-table beauty books for a while as a tween. This is not to say I ever became good at it, but I do like all the do-dads and beauty artifacts. And I have always fantasized about the styling weekend with a girlfriend. Or even the spa weekend of the skin care side of things. But most of my girlfriends aren’t as interested in this stuff.

I also love the make-over in movies. There’s actually a scholarly book about this, The Makeover In Movies. I haven’t read it yet but it’s on my list. Cher’s makeover in Moonstruck would most definitely be addressed in this book, (she’s in the index), as this is an iconic makeover sequence in a movie. Cher visits a hair salon, buys a new dress and does her makeup slowly in her living room all in anticipation of a date to the opera with Nicholas Cage.

You can also see grooming images in Good Times and the ladies go through a somewhat big, albeit offscreen, transformation in The Witches of Eastwick. (It’s the sex doing the makeover in their case.) And we can’t forget the bad makeover Cher receives in Silkwood from her mortician girlfriend, where she’s made to look like a corpse by mistake and Drew is snarky about it and then Angela gets into a snit and moves out. And it’s a subtle one but the Madame at the whorehouse in Chastity does a creepy baby-doll dress makeover on Cher’s Chastity character. And then Cher tries to make herself presentable to her parents (and not look like a drug addict) in the movie Mask. (I tried to recreate that star necklace, by the way.)

So lot’s of Cher makeover moments in the movies, which is an understandable cinematic impulse because there have been so many Cher transformations in her personal timeline. Cher has always changed her look to suit the times and she seems to enjoy updating her personal and professional looks: from the grunge bangs and hippie duds of the 1960s to the sleek, long-haired goddess in jeans look of the 1970s to the big wigs and tight clothes of the 1980s, and it goes on.

Cher is much more outrageous than me in her explorations. I just like to try different brands of mascara.

Dear Cher, I am going with a boy I am not sure I really like. I go with him because I am lonely, but I really love my old boyfriend (who doesn’t love me). This new boy is nice and sweet. Do you think I am doing the wrong thing? In Need of Help, Bow, Washington

Cher’s Response:

Dear In Need of Help, You definitely are doing the wrong thing. If this boy is so nice, you should not lead him on—for eventually you will hurt him very deeply. If your old boyfriend snapped his fingers, you would go back to him in a flash and leave your present boyfriend suffering—just as you are suffering now. Since you know what it feels like to be hurt, learn something from it and don’t hurt this nice boy. Take my advice and you’ll be a better person for it.

Cher Scholar’s Response:

I don’t even think this would be Cher’s response anymore. I mean she didn’t have the same feelings for Gene Simmons she had for Gregg Allman. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Each relationship is its own weather system. Simmons, like this boy, had all the markings of a rebound relationship. Getting back on the horse, romantically speaking. Not every relationship is your forever home. Some are truly “We’ve Got Tonight” situations and this is fine if the two people are on the same page. All sorts of people are out there in the wilderness trying to find their way. And we can’t even assume that much about this relationship based on the question. The boy hasn’t weighed in about where he’s coming from.

Sometimes rebounds rebound again into something permanent. Seems to me what makes any relationship healthy is communication. So just make sure intentions are clear at all times and if or when feelings change, talk it out.

What is not okay is withholding your feelings about a relationship and leading another person into believing you are more serious or dedicated than you are. I have a very good friend who’s parents divorced when he was an adult because the husband had been having a marriage-long affair with a woman he had always considered his true love. The wife wasn’t as upset by the affair as she was by the fact that she had wasted her youth on a relationship that wasn’t true love.

There’s a difference between using someone and being lonely together.

That said, relationships are very complicated and even in my friend’s parents’ case, who’s to say what was going on and what torment people go through when they are navigating current relationships and when to end them. For example, why did Sonny stay with Cher when he was often distracted by other women? I’m sure his motivations were complicated: loyalty to Cher, desire to keep the money coming in, true affection. Why did Cher stay with Sonny so long during that same time? As Cher has said over and over, theirs was a very complicated relationship. She saw Sonny as a parental figure to her, a lover, a sibling, a co-parent to Chastity. Relationships are rarely smoothly operating machines or rarely cleanly broken off. It’s almost a topic that is beyond advice.

Sonny gave Cher a big wet kiss immediately after their divorce hearing! A very public kiss. Cher says it was hard to stay mad at Sonny, even minutes after a custody battle. Sounds very complicated to me.

Dear Cher, My parents won’t let me buy records or any of the other things teenagers like, even though it’s my own money. How can I convince them that it’s my money and that they should let me do what I like with it? Kar, Northbrook, Ill.

Cher’s Response:

Dear Kar, If you earn this money, either by babysitting or by doing other work, then you should be allowed to buy anything you wish with it within reason. If you get an allowance, you might tell your mother you are willing to set aside a certain amount of it for savings, but that you feel you should spend the rest on harmless “fun” things you enjoy.

Cher Scholar’s Response:

This is a tough one. Teenage years are mostly about testing your independence. Some very controlling parents out there inflict an “anything under my roof goes by my rules” policy. My parents were not like this (that practically had to push me out of the nest) although they were what you would consider strict in many ways. I was the last in line and my parents were pretty laissez-faire by the time I came along. They didn’t much notice what I was doing with my little amount of money. I was saving up my lunch money and buying record albums and Taco Bell dinners with friends. Nothing to test a “within reason” qualification. I wouldn’t even have known where to find the unreasonable stuff. But I was below everyone’s radar, I’m pretty sure. Recently, a family member labeled me as a goth kid, which surprised me because I had pink wallpaper, pink carpet and listened to Barry Manilow all day. But I guess within those confines, I was kind of a Barry-Manilow-listening, pink-loving kind of sad kid. Maybe a Pink Goth. Was that a thing? No it was not.

Some parents believe in providing trust until trust is broken. Some parents have to control every aspect of their habitats. And I don’t know any way around those kinds of parents aside from hanging in there until you can secure your own independence and move out as soon as you can. I don’t see this type of parent being suddenly convinced by arguments from Cher in 16 Magazine. In fact, I think those parents turned out to be some of the Cher-haters we see out there today. “That hippie Cher tried to corrupt our daughter Kar!”

This is a real problem, though, especially now that there is a whole segment of the population trying to re-define what it means to be a girl, limiting her choices in marriage, family planning and education, let alone all the fun teenage stuff.

But in this case, it could also be a parent who has come from nothing who is attempting to teach their kid about saving money or goal planning and not fettering all their monies on movie tickets and rock-and-roll records.

I’m sort of thankful for the latitude I did receive. It allowed me to follow my intellectual pursuits and learn self-sufficiency, which is what my parents wanted for me (including and maybe especially my father), not to depend on relationships for those things. But that’s not every parental motive out there so…

I don’t know what kind of parents Sonny and Cher were. Chaz Bono has written about this mostly in Becoming Chaz. Cher was gone a lot and some of the nannies seemed better than others. Elijah spent time in boarding schools which he seems to resent.

I haven’t talked to any parent who doesn’t bemoan the fact of how difficult parenting is. Just existentially hard. How you never really know what you’re doing. Short of abuse, it’s good to give parents some latitude for screw-ups. ‘

Does not letting your kid have popular music constitute abuse? I don’t know. I do know a lot of kids who grew up in restrictive households that forbade pop-culture and junk foods and as adults these friends of mine now have trouble navigating moderation with those very things. I’ve also seen problems resulting from over-indulgence. Teaching moderation itself seems to be a good idea.

Dear Sonny, I have a crush on a boy in my class. I think he likes me. How should I act? Just Asking, Bellflower, Calif.

Sonny’s Response:

Dear Just Asking, When you are around this boy, act sweet and not snooty. Don’t go overboard and come on too strong, but at the same time don’t be shy. Let him know “diplomatically” that you’re interested, and then see if he responds. If he does, show him that you are really interested in him, but at the same time try to make him feel that he is flirting with you—not you with him. Try to start one of those “accidental” conversations. Find out what his interests are, and if they are different from yours “bone-up” so that when and if you talk to him, you will be able to say something he wants to hear. Good luck.

Cher Scholar’s Response:

Good luck, indeed. Does dating in this world require a poli sci degree so you can flirt “diplomatically?” Just asking, myself.

“At the same time,” maybe I’m also just asking for a friend. Like all of them. Because this is crazy-making. There are two “but at the same times” in Sonny’s headache-inducing response. And that’s not okay. But at the same time….no, still not okay.

There was a very sweet Muppets (ABC) episode, “A Tail of Two Piggies” where Gonzo, Pepe and Rizzo became bachelor roommates and were having trouble getting “the womens” (as Pepe says) to come to their house parties. They discovered that one of the best ways to initiate friendship with women was to become interested in what they were interested in. I think this is fine advice. But it could also send you off in a direction that is both a flirting-fail and something that changes the trajectory of your life. This has happened multiple times in my life, once when I tried to become a better high school student because I thought boys liked smart girls and another time I became interested in Buddhism and then 42 books later—this.

What’s not okay is all the intricacies around how to flirt properly. This is simply the tortured evolution of culture and it becomes stupid at some point You can’t manage that tightrope of flirting rules all while trying to “be yourself.” Just not compatible tasks. And you might be a genuinely annoying self. What then? Then maybe what you do is to go work on yourself—just in general. The whole population will probably appreciate that, not just someone you fancy. Work on being less annoying (which is full-time job for some of us, I get it). Keep tweaking into a self you feel you can comfortably be. You may not match up comfortably with people you like. They might even get annoyed with your best self. As unfortunately as that is, the alternative is pretty grim.

One of the saddest of the Hans Christian Andersen stories is “The Little Mermaid” which is a cautionary tale about this very thing, trying to be what someone else wants all while losing yourself in the process.

I guess in all things, moderation. It’s hard.

Dating is full of strife in Cher movies. Sonny and Cher battle about their futures in Good Times. There are all those poor fellows who try to decipher Cher’s character in Chastity, Dolly’s short burn-out with Angela in Silkwood, Rusty’s comparatively stable romance with Gar in Mask, the various jealousies that develop with the foursome in The Witches of Eastwick, the illicit affair with a juror in Suspect, the tumultuous beginning for Lorretta and Ronny in Moonstruck, the silly and sad relationship between the flighty Mrs. Flax and Lou in Mermaids.

The women don’t ever behave as Sonny advises girls to behave in any of these stories, nor did Cher herself ultimately behave that way. In fact, you can make a case they all flirted pretty badly in a plethora of wonderful ways.

Dear Sonny, Doesn’t femininity count with a guy nowadays? To be popular, does a girl have to be immodest? Where I live, it seems that ladylike girls are “duds.” What’ is your opinion? Curious, Medina, Ohio

Sonny’s Response:

Dear Curious, No matter how a guy acts, in his heart he much prefers a feminine girl. He will go out with girls who come on strong, but not more than once or twice. Stick to your principles. Be your real self at all times. You may have to wait a little longer to get asked out on dates, but when you do it will be guys who really respect you.

Cher Scholar’s Response:

(By the way, I was just in Medina, Ohio.)

First of all, this unfortunate answer says more about Sonny than anything. This is dating advice dreck, this “boys only really like nice girls” answer.

Secondly, I can’t tell if this “immodesty” refers to mini-skirts or free love. I also can’t tell if this is a parent writing in masquerading as a teen.

Some guys (and girls) are attracted to sporty girls, to bad girls, to nutty girls, to “feminine” girls. Some people are attracted to others who are sometimes sporty, sometimes tom-boys, sometimes feminine and sometimes every other type of way to be a person. What a weird idea that flirting has to be so performative toward femininity.

Sonny is definitely not the best person to be answering this question. In fact, it’s relevant to consider Sonny’s age here. He is ten-to-fifteen years older than these hippie tweens and his answer is going to be much more antiquated than, say, if Paul McCartney were answering these letters. This was a time of sexual revolution and it made many older adults, like Sonny, very uncomfortable.

“Guys who really respect you.” Please. You know where you can put that respect, right? As a girl who didn’t fool around enough, I will defend any girl who did.

Do you need his respect? No, you don’t. Do you need your self-respect? Yes, you do. Let that be the guiding principles you stick to. If you don’t want to be “immodest,” whatever that is, don’t. If you don’t feel particularly modest, go out there and live your best life. For me, this modesty shit is part of the fetishization of virginity. Which is all to say men have historically wanted to determine how and women should mate and procreate.

It was a different time. Well, different times are always around the corner again. I am just very thankful to have grown up in the time I did, as a carefree pop-culture addicted Gen-Xer in the 1980s.

I don’t even think this answer has anything to do with how Sonny or Cher behaved as young adults either, or at least Cher who was an aspiring street kid.

One of the amazing things about The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour was how they refashioned the vamps of history as sexually independent, provocative and ultimately persevering women. Better examples of being a human could be found there.

Dear Sonny & Cher from 16 Magazine, Part 8

August 7, 2024 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

This week’s installment of Dear Sonny & Cher has a new preamble. And Sonny redeems himself from last week’s creepy, player response. We get an almost sultry picture of Cher this time with lots of eyeliner and mascara. We also get a photo of Sonny attempting sultriness but hitting more goofiness with that officer’s cap.

Being young is no fun if you’re worried about your appearance, nervous about how to act, upset about your boyfriend or unhappy about the way your parents treat you. It’s even worse if you have no one to confide in, no one who can help you solve your problems with sound advice.

Sonny and I want to help you in every way we possibly can. If you have a problem an older girl could best help you solve, write to me (Cher). If it’s the kind of problem a guy can best help you solve, write to Sonny. We can’t promise to answer every letter we receive—we receive so many letters, that would be impossible. But [e]very month Sonny and I carefully select a cross-section of the letters representing your most acute problems—so even though your problem many not be answered directly, it will be answered!

As you see, our space is limited and we can only advise on a few problems at a time. So if your problem isn’t discussed in this issue of 16, please look again next month—for sooner or later you will find your problem and our advice right here in 16 Magazine.

Dear Cher, I have these dreadful dark circles under my eyes. They make me look like I have two black eyes. I get plenty of rest and have a proper diet—I’ve tried to cover the circles with makeup, but nothing helps. What can I do? Black Eyes, St. Clair Shores, Mich.

Cher’s Response:

Dear Black Eyes, I have three answers. One: dark circles are sometimes inherited and there is nothing you can do about them. Two: are you in good health? Dark circles sometimes indicate anything from kidney disorder to a mild virus. You should ask your doctor about these dark circles. Three: if you find they are not inherited and not caused by poor health, then go back to the makeup treatment. I suggest that you try Yeardley Eyeliter (you know, like they advertise on The Monkees). I, too, have a tendency toward dark circles, and this product has done miracles for me.

Cher Scholar’s Response:

I wonder what Monkees advertisement she means. I couldn’t find an eyeliter commercial but I did find this hilarious Monkees Yardly Black Label commercial (“Be the guy’s who’s got it!”) I found an image of the eyeliter product (listed as an “antique”) on Pinterest:

There are now similar natural remedies for dark eye circles. There are also undereye concealers still to buy. Cher has always been interested in beauty products and giving advice on them. Here are a few I found today:

1. “I tried Cher’s Favorite Shampoo and Conditioner for a Week!” (Video) in which an influencer goes through recent Cher product plugs. What a fabulously fun idea to try these all!

2 “Cher, 75, Reveals the $7 Drugstore Face Wash She Loves for Sensitive Skin” (Article) – it’s nice that a lot of these plugs are drugstore brands.

3. “Cher’s Favorite Beauty Products that you can still buy today” (Video)

4. What Cher Has To Say About Beauty (Article)

Okay, they’re not all drugstore brands but you can play with them or not as you can afford to.

Speaking of makeup tricks, Cher has also appeared in books by makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin including “Making Faces” and “Face Forward.”

You can get as exuberant or cynical about beauty products as you want. Even after spending billions of dollars on skin care and makeup, no product really moves the needle all that much.

And we are fed a bill-of-goods half the time. I recently had an alarming experience with lady razors. I was visiting my parents last month and didn’t have a good razor to use before a birthday massage. I went combing through my mother’s guest bathroom drawers and could find only an unopened Gillette Fusion men’s razor most likely left by my brother as he was their most recent overnight guest.

Now I don’t go scrummaging through Mr. Cher Scholar’s man-stuff so I have never had the opportunity to use a men’s razor but out of desperation I decided to use this one. It was heavy. It wasn’t pink. What if it peeled off my delicate lady skin? I was seriously petrified right before using it. Like I might bleed to death by using that extra blade. Wait a minute. Why do the mens get that extra blade? After doing one leg and experiencing the closest shave I’ve ever felt in my life, I got pissed for all woman kind. WTF. They’ve been selling us sub-par f**king razors!

And the truth of it is women shave their legs in America is because companies like Gillette wanted to expand the sales of razors and used women’s magazines to convince women we should have hairless all-the-things.

And then they go and sell us shitty pink razors!

Dear Cher, I’m 13 years old and this is my problem: I’ve liked this boy who lives near me for a long time. I told this to a few of my friends, and soon I realized that someone had told him about it too. One of my friends told me that he had said he liked me. When we had school pictures taken, all of us kids were trading our extra pictures with one another. I wanted to trade one with him, so that I could have a picture of him, and I mentioned this to a couple of my girl friends. I feel pretty sure that at least one of them told him. After that, he got very nasty to me, and one day in the library he told me that he hated me. Please help me. Brokenhearted, Gilbert, Minn.

Cher’s Response:

Dear Brokenhearted, Why, er, why {“why, er, why?”] did you have to tell the world about your feeling for this boy? If you are really honest about it, you knew that telling three friends was like broadcasting it. To have them tell him that you like him was O.K. But the thing about the pictures was—well, coming on too strong and it looked like you were chasing him. Naturally, he recoiled from this feeling of being captured. The fact is, a girl can flirt a little, but she has to draw the line somewhere, because the boy likes to capture her and not be captured. The only think you can do now is keep your mouth shut, maintain your cool and wait. Maybe if you are quiet and demure long enough, he will come back to you.

Cher Scholar’s Response:

Ugh. This is the most depressing response I’ve ever read. Whatever happened to entireties to honesty? No, not honesty right now. First, pretend you are Cinderella and flee the scene without a shoe. These crazy courtship rituals.

My bad advice would be to roll your eyes, Snow White, and go find dwarves without hang ups. Friendlier pastures. Friendship knows nothing about forwardness and faux pas. I have no patience for these subtleties of chasing vs. demurring. As a naturally quiet person (believe it or not), demurring is my natural state but so what? In defense of all the forward girls, everyone needs to grow up. The games of playing hard to get will seem stupid when you’re on your death bed. Asking for a picture should not seem like some kind of dreadful “chasing.”

But happily we have alternate advice. The Susan Dey book, Secrets On Boys, Beauty & Popularity, has arrived and I’ve started reading it. And wouldn’t you know, this very issue is addressed in the first chapter called very succinctly “Boys,”

Fasten your seat belts because we are going to hear from the teen-idol-of-teen-idols himself.

“Boys—especially teen-age boys—are runners up to the Sphinx when it comes to letting a girl know whether the romance is one-sided or whether he cares, too. I used to think this was just because boys were unexplainably nasty and mean about this but then I had a heart-to-heart talk with David Cassidy, and he let me in on a few things.

Mostly, a guy worries about letting a girl know he likes her too much. One slip of the tongue, a boy thinks, and pretty soon Doris and Ella and Sue and Ruth and Jean and Barbara and Claudian and Marie and Carol and Connie and Ann and Dorothy will know. What’s worse, a boy thinks, is that they’ll tell Sam, Dave, Fred, George, Roger, Russ, Ralph, Steve, Kenny, and Chuck next. Soon, continues this nightmare that a boy dreams up for himself, Mom, Dad, little brother, and Aunt Agnes will all be bugging him about his First True Love. All this is enough, in a boy’s mind, to convince him that he really doesn’t love this special girl at all!.

David says it’s a big step for a boy to admit, to himself or publicly, that he likes a girl because girls have been doll-carrying sissies [oh dear] for so long that as far as a boy is concerned, finding yourself in love with one is a major shock. The first thing a rough, tough….boy does, David says, is seriously question his sanity!”

Well, that does explain how a this boy can go from liking Brokenhearted girl to freaking out over a school picture and telling her he hates her. That is if we can believe David Cassidy is speaking for many of the other boys and not just the troubled David Cassidy.

But there’s yet another way to look at this. My high school friend went off to college and met a boy she liked a lot but she was in competition with another girl. Eventually this boy chose her and she asked him why he did so. He said it was because he was going to go out with the one who was the most aggressive in trying to date him. My friend was proud of her winnings but I thought her prize was a big dud who had no real dog in the fight and might possibly not even be able to feel love for either of them or maybe anybody.

Love asserts itself pretty pretty strongly. It shouldn’t be so hard an Olympic trial is required. If there wasn’t one thing more substantial to love about my friend besides her “trying hard” than that relationship would always be vulnerable to a future competitor willing to try even harder.

The point is neither of these extremes is good: pirate-afraid-of-capture guy or immovable-statue guy. What we all need is flexibility in a person.

Equally problematic are those who look for hard-and-fast roles from another person. I had another eternally single friend who once said she wanted to be the garden and not the gardener. She meant she wants to be taken care of without having to take care of. This is just not the description of a healthy relationship. Nobody has explained it better recently than Michelle Obama in her new book, The Light We Carry. This is an absolutely beautiful description of a healthy couple:

“….you’ll almost certainly come to see that there’s no such thing as a fifty-fifty balance. Instead, it’ll be like beads on an abacus, sliding back and forth—the math rarely tidy, the equation never quite solved. A relationship is dynamic this way, full of change, always evolving. At no point will both of you feel like things are perfectly fair and equal. Someone will always be adjusting. Someone will always be sacrificing. One person may be up while the other is down…in a strong partnership, both people will take their turns at compromise, building that shared sense of home together, there in the in-between.

Regardless of how wildly and deeply in love you are, you will be required to ignore all sorts of your partner’s foibles. You will be be required to ignore all sorts of minor irritations and at least a few major ones, too, trying to assert love and constancy over all of it—over all the rough spots and inevitable disruptions. You will need to do this as often and as compassionately as you can. And you will need to be doing it with someone who is equally able and willing to create the same latitude and show the same forbearance toward you—to love you despite all the baggage you show up with, despite what you look like and how you behave when you are at your absolute worst.”

And I know we’re talking about kids here. But let’s just give them some insight into how things should be right from the start.

This is one of my favorite pictures of Cher and Robert Camilletti. It’s from her first commercial for Uninhibited perfume in the late 1980s. That is the goal of any relationship, to be uninhibited. You shouldn’t have to worry about being demure or aggressive or whatever it is you “supposed” to be. You should feel free to be who you are. And that is hard enough between two very different people. Why throw in additional crap about how the thing should or shouldn’t get going?

Dear Sonny, I have been told that I’m cute. [Again with the I’ve been told I’m cute thing.] I feel that I’m popular in school and well-loved at home. I don’t have a particular problem but I do have a request. Please tell me your idea of a perfect girl—her personality, clothes and her popularity standing. Needing Ideas, Arlington Heights, Ill.

Sonny’s Response:

Dear Needing Ideas, Surprise! There is no such thing as a perfect girl, so don’t try to become one. If you do, you’ll probably ruin everything that you now have. Your personality should be unique and your very won. Clothes don’t make the girl, as you know. [She doesn’t seem to know, Sonny.] It’s good to have friends, because they are true friends; it’s good to be liked, because you’re likable; but popularity just for the sake of being popular is of absolutely no value. Just be yourself and don’t worry about these extraneous things.

Cher Scholar’s Response:

Great response Sonny. What makes me think it will be lost on this Needing Ideas girl?

I have a member of the family in pursuit of a very hard line perfection and I have said the same thing to them. Perfection is like a pretty and smooth surface without anything for another person to hook on to. It’s ultimately alienating. Which is why we develop our deep affections for flaws. Think about someone you love. Think of their rough parts. Those are the hooks, the heart hooks. We’re not talking about homicidal flaws or battery-level flaws. We’re talking about the exhaustion of perfection and the endearments toward things that are less than perfect (and sometimes downright broken) in others and in ourselves. We each have those things that pull on our heart-strings and those things are never perfections.

Cher is a great example of this. I have never been attracted to the kind of men she is attracted to. We all have our things we like or don’t like. Cher is not drawn to classically beautiful men. She is truly a woman who has followed her heart in these matters.

Dear Sonny, My question can only be answered by a guy. Please tell me honestly how guys feel about freckles. I’m loaded with them and I hate them. A suntan doesn’t cover them up because they pop through—and makeup does no good. Freckles, Chicago, Ill.

Sonny’s Response:

Dear Freckles, Forget them. Period. By noticing them so much, you are literally turning mole hills into mountains [well, not literally…literally they’re freckles]. Because you are so uptight about your freckles, you think that everybody else does nothing but stare at them. Not so. They may notice them for the first ten or twenty seconds they see you, but human beings are so constructed that (unless they are just plain evil) their eyes and minds are more interested in the human being and not in surface distractions. Freckles aren’t a fault. They’re a fact. Since you can’t do anything about them, leave them alone. Concentrate on your good points. I used to be excruciatingly self-conscious about my nose, and I learned to practice what I’m preaching to you now. Believe me, it helped. When I started concentrating on my good points, I started doing groovy things. By the way, there are some examples of freckle-laden ladies who decided to ignore their freckles—Doris Day, Julie Andrews, model Jean Shrimpton and Jane Asher.

Cher Scholar’s Response:

Perfect answer, Sonny. I have nothing to add. Freckles are sexy.

It’s a Good Day To Be a Cher Fan

August 6, 2024 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

Recently I was sitting on my ex-sister-in-laws couch waiting to leave for a concert and she was telling me about all the stuff she was trying to get rid of and so I showed her all the Cher stuff I had pre-ordered sitting on my Amazon orders page. I’m going the other way, you see.

Sonny & Cher Compilation – out now

While I was gone I ordered the new Sonny & Cher “curated” compilation from the Now Playing series (I got mine from Barnes & Noble). The comp only has 10 songs on sea-blue vinyl. There are some unusual choices in the non-hit “Sing C’est La Vie” and the Cher solo non-hit “Walk on Guilded Splinters.”

Cher Compilations – out 20 September

The day I left for Boston Cher released news of a new compilations series “Cher Forever Classics” and “Forever Fan.” This was a confusing set of options to sort through, different media, different track lists and different cover art choices. I’m also confused about the title. The CD art sticker shows “Forever Classics” but the listing in Amazon and on Cher.com is just “Forever.” I think the difference is one set is “Forever Classics” and the other is “Forever Fan.” You may recognize the cover art from the CR Fashion Book photo shoot with Kim Kardashian and Naomi Campbell.

Let’s start with the CD options of Forever Classics:

Black and white cover CD (baseline) – 21 tracks
Blue cover CD (Amazon exclusive) – no track list
Red cover CD (Cher.com) – 21 tracks

These are the vinyl options for Forever Classics:

Black and white cover, 2 clear vinyl (baseline)- 21 tracks
Blue cover, 2 blue vinyl (Amazon exclusive) – no track list

Apparently the other version, Forever Fan, will be streaming only and include 40 songs with some deep-cut tracks: https://genius.com/albums/Cher/Forever-fan

To support the Forever Fan, Cher has rereleased her 1974 Warner Bros single “A Woman’s Story” as an online single in streaming platforms and on her YouTube channel. In fact, the singleness of it made me think this was a new song being released with possibly the same name. It’s an interesting strategy to highlight this lost song in such a public way but I’m glad Cher did so. Although it makes you wonder what a single really is in this day and age. Not only is this an old song, but hasn’t Taylor Swift made the idea of a single obsolete in the last year of every song of her album charting because it’s stream-able over and over again?

This song is later-day Phil Spector production and I think his style really gives the song an ethereal and lush lifeforce. Thanks to remastering I finally understand the line “And if it had to be tried, I tried it.” It also makes me understand Rona Barrett’s odd interview question to Cher about whether she ever sold her body for sex. Possibly Barrett had just heard this song and wondered if Cher was singing from experience.

I had heard about this very single in Cher biographies and had just gotten my drivers license in 1985 but was afraid to drive on St. Louis highways so I took back roads down to a south St. Louis county used record store where I found the 45. I was so excited, like I had struck gold; but the drive home took so long I was almost late for a dinner out with some visiting family and my mother was really pissed (this before the days of cell phones). Needless to say I had to wait later until that night to hear it. And I love to eat out so this was an odd torture for me. This was pre-Internet and I had not heard not a note of it before. I loved it and also its b-side cover of The Ronettes’ “Baby, I Love You” (not on the Forever Fan compilation). It took me decades longer to find the remaining Spector song in the trilogy, the Harry Nilsson duet which I found one day at a used record store near Kent State in Ohio while driving from St. Louis to Yonkers, New York.

Here is the song from Cher’s Youtube. Cher Universe has already made a fan video from the CR fashion book photo shoot film as a base.

There’s possibly a new tour in the works, the Hall of Fame induction in need of merch and credibility, and a memoir that needs a soundtrack. This new compilation and this new lead song might help assist all those ventures in spirit.

Cher, the Memoir – out 19 November

Which brings us to the memoir.

The Christmas Album Vinyl – 11 October

Cher’s Christmas album is also being re-released this year in a cracked blue vinyl as an Amazon exclusive. My high school friends and I used to watch Rankin & Bass and other animated Christmas specials in July for fun so I took the opportunity to do a summer listen to the Christmas album again.

The “Met Gala” Funko Pop – out any day now

My Funko Pop order was again marked as a problem. This happened last time too with the Ringmaster version. Mysteriously it just hasn’t shipped yet and the doll is now listed at a higher price ($18 instead of $12). Annoying.

Dear Sonny & Cher from 16 Magazine, Part 7

July 30, 2024 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

This is a big two-pager! A quarter of which is taken up by a gigantic pic of Sonny & Cher. I hate this outfit Sonny is wearing, by the way. It’s the black and white, psychedelic, chessboard, optical illusion animation suit pattern. Bleh. I can’t directly look at it without my third-eye twitching. Sonny & Cher wore these matching chessboard suits on the back of their 1967 duet album, in Case You’re In Love, a spread that included some otherwise great photos of Sonny & Cher walking outside in Paris.

We have a lot to get through this week so let’s get started, four questions for Cher and three for Sonny.

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

Dear Cher, I am almost 13 and there is a boy whom I have liked for over a year. He has never paid much attention to me. I have tried all the little tricks and secrets, but none seem to work! I do something “special” once in a while to get his attention. I am popular and have been told I am cute. Can you give me some new and helpful advice? No results, Beirut, Lebanon

[Beirut! Lebanon!! Cher goes international again!]

Cher’s Response:

Dear No Results, Maybe you are trying too hard. Maybe this special guy feels the pressure and is retreating from it—and you. I remember once when I was popular with all the kids but this one guy. I really went out of my way to try to get him—and he knew it. And I didn’t get him. So, I advice you to “cool it.” I think it would be smart to suddenly be indifferent toward him. Maybe that special trick will arouse his interest.

Cher Scholar’s Response:

Maybe he’s not into cute. I’m serious. Love is mysterious. If it made any sense, atoms would probably collapse or something. This is actually a good response. I so hope this story will end up in the upcoming Cher memoir but it’s not likely.

I don’t think even the trick of indifference will do any better than the other “special” maneuvers, sorry to say. It comes down to much we can’t control at the end of the day. This reminds me of a poem I wrote a few years ago about Swann’s Way and love being a mysterious switch that comes on (or it doesn’t) from sometimes subconscious reasons or past life reasons. Hell if we know.

He might be gay. He may not be ready. He may not be into you. Biologists think it might even all come down to a smell.

Even the idea of “cute” is an existential crisis in the making. Who told you you were cute? Your mother? Another boy who likes you? Your girlfriends? The mirror? Aunt Maude? They all have agendas, No Results. You can’t even trust the mirror.

Forget all that. Just do you the best you can. Let the chips fall where they will. Magic will happen. Heartaches will happen. Very strange things will happen.

Cher keeps saying “what belongs to you, comes to you” and I do believe that although if we all sit around waiting for things to come to us, procreation will probably come to a standstill because everybody’s waiting and nobody’s (figuratively or literally) coming. Nothing much comes naturally. Is a bar atmosphere really all that natural? Is filling out an online dating form natural? Some of the mating dances out there in the wild don’t seem all that natural either. Have you see male blowfish art? Is he trying too hard? I really don’t know. The blowfish ladies seem to like it.

I like to think of it as a dance. Sometimes you move foreword, sometimes you move back, sometimes you don’t move at all.

In Sonny and Cher’s case, a forced separation did shock them into realizing what they meant to each other. And technically, that was Cher’s mother’s doing.

Dear Cher, I am 13 and there is this girl (I’ll call her Amy) who simply hates my steady, so she is spreading bad gossip about him and me and is shattering my reputation at school. Neither I nor my steady has ever done a thing to this girl. We have no solution. Can you help us? “Rep,” No City

Cher’s Response:

Dear “Rep,” First off, you ought to be aware of what is really going on by now. The girl digs your boy friend! That is why she is trying to hurt you and to break you two up. Naturally, there are some kids who are going to wonder if her gossip is true, but your real friends won’t give this girl a second listen. Just be polite to her—but in general, ignore her and her bad remarks. Most people are going to realize that it’s all just “sour grapes” on her part. As for your steady, I am sure he is man enough to ignore her, too. If he really loves you, this sort of thing will not deter him at all.

Cher Scholar’s Response:

Mean girls. Now we’re getting into some juicy stuff.

This is not a bad response either. I’m going to bring my mother into this here. First of all because she was showing me her high school yearbook last week and when we came to one girl’s photo, (let’s call her June because I don’t know any Junes except TV’s June Cleaver), she mentioned that the girl was “wild.” As I inquired further, I found out the word “wild” could mean anything from slutty to lawless. Which was quite a range. And I don’t want to quantify this girl’s character here but it’s all to say a “reputation” among girls, we can see, can last over 70 years! It’s no small thing.

My mother and I also discussed the terms “easy,” “fast” and the 80s insult of being called “slutty.” Words like this are what society uses, however you feel about it, to control the sexual (or even affectionate) behavior of women. You can call him a man-slut (f*%kboy is the most recent term I’ve head the kids use on reels) but this just comes across as funny for obvious reasons. (The funniest term on this list was homme fetal.) Just the idea of a promiscuous man seems culturally strange. Lothario is not quite the successful insult.

I’ve had plenty of drama with means girls myself (in my own house, sometimes) but not for Rep’s reasons. Remember I was so behind in matters of love, I couldn’t be the target of salacious sex rumors (unfortunately). But I did plenty of other transgressive things to ruffle the mean-girl feathers. Due to copious amounts of pride, (probably cultivated from early pre-school mean girl experiences), I was steadfast in being who I was in a world-scape determined to make you conform to popular-girl norms. I followed the path(s) of what I genuinely liked. And suffered the consequences….and to this day still do.

The music I chose to listen to, the clothes I chose to wear, the ideas I had. the things I said.

I found safety in a group of boys and girls who were outsiders as well. And no, not those cool outsiders. The geeky outsiders because sometimes who you really are is not all that hip.

I also posed this problem to my parents while I’m here in Cleveland. We talked about the way teen girls and boys handle conflicts differently. My Dad commented how difficult these social problems are. I wondered wouldn’t it just lead to a fist fight between boys? No trash talk. Girls tend to go all devious and political on each other socially. In my experience millennials and younger girls tend to be better and my best female bosses have been younger than me. Also, I have some amazing girlfriends in my life (of all ages). But overall, statistically speaking, I find my relationships with women much more complicated and hazardous.

This year’s big meme is relevant here, the one where women were asked if they found themselves lost in a forest, would they rather encounter a man they didn’t know or a bear. Most women polled picked the bear and men took great offense at this, like men were bad and bears were good. But I can completely see the computations running in a woman’s head considering this question. She’s running the odds.

The odds are good a bear won’t attack unless the bear is hormonal or starving or fretting as a bear-parent. On the other hand, the chance of a sexual assault by a man is concerningly high out there in the wild. Anywhere from 1 in 5 to 1 in 6. The chance of a bear attack is 1 in 2 million. It’s just a game of odds.

And contemplating mean girls, I find it interesting no one has posed to women the idea of an encounter with a woman they don’t know versus a man they don’t know. Because this changes the equation a bit (for me at least). There’s a chance the woman might become my bestie. Totally! That would be great, surviving in the woods with a fun girl (I’ve already done this twice, once in roller skates). Outdoor slumber parties. I love it! But, if I’m being honest, there’s a greater chance a woman will throw me under the bus. A rapist is terrible, no doubt, but at least he might keep me alive for some nefarious purpose. The woman might probably get rid of me immediately in completion for resources or in competition for the questionable men-folk in the forest.

Actually, my biggest enemy in this situation is going to be myself because who the hell wants to deal with any of this dangerous human bullshit? I might just sacrifice myself to the bear.

Deep breath. Survival is hard. Social survival is harder.

Susan Sarandon got called to the carpet a few years ago for some subliminally mean-girl comments she made about Cher. She said Cher stole her part in The Witches of Eastwick and then claimed Cher said this during filming: Y’know, I really have a hard time being in a scene that’s not about me.” So we just took her lines and she got to go home.”

Immediately, Sarandon tried to qualify it by saying, ‘Y’know, nobody would say that but certainly everybody feels that way. Good for her to say it!” (Bitchiness disguised as compliment.)

Sarandon went on to say she got her beautiful wigs and gowns in the movie from Cher and that Cher was ‘fantastic,’ ‘generous’ and ‘so funny.’ Cher responded with love for Sarandon and then Susan took to Twitter to clear the air, writing: ‘So much love & respect 4U. Devastated was taken as anything else. Also said how I wish I had balls 2 say same.’ Susan also tweeted: ‘And mentioned how generous you were in giving me ur wig & gown. Anyway, please accept my heartfelt apology.’ Read the blow-by-blow.

The press loves mean-girl drama. Cher famously shaded Madonna one time and made some mean-girl comments about Miley Cyrus (that twerking, tongue-gate performance) after which Cher apologized and called out her own ego and big mouth. They have since had very positive exchanges, especially about Miley’s “Believe” cover.

It’s a work in progress, this mean-girl stuff. Cher has since worked on trying to be positive when discussing other women in interviews.

Dear Cher, I am FAT. That is a fact—and I can’t lose weight as I have no will power. My mom won’t let me wear mod fashions or hair-dos, because she says I don’t look good in them (she’s probably right). Please help me find out how to lose weight. Also, how can I whiten my teeth? Desperate, Thornton, Col.

Cher’s Response:

Dear Desperate, If you have really tried everything, I think there is hope for you in only one direction now. I think your mom should take you to see your family doctor. You should have a check-up and (if it is not harmful for you) you should be given some kind of medication that will help you to control your appetite. When you start to lose a few pounds, by all means get some mod gear—as that will inspire you to stay on your “diet” and give you pride in the fact that you are reducing. To whiten your teeth, brush them gently with common household baking soda once a week. Brush downwards only. Since most of us are born with our teeth a permanent color, it is hard to whiten teeth that are naturally sort of yellowish, but you can try. Best of luck.

Cher Scholar’s Response:

Teeth whiteners have come a long way. Diets have not. Many dramatic methods have come and gone, from a plethora of extreme diets to suction to stapling to medical appetite suppressants, most recently injections. The first step in any weight loss journey should be guided by a visit to a nutritionist, as they are the most science-based practitioners in the morass of opinions about weight issues. (See the responses in Part 5).

You can find teeth whiteners everywhere: toothpaste, mouthwash, strips, pens. You could argue, (not to go full-Sneetches here), that teeth are oppressively white these days. Sometimes I miss the natural look of 1970s television shows. Technicolor teeth.

Cher pretty much had pearly whites from the beginning of her professional career. Maybe this is because her mother was a model and actress and had some beauty tricks to pass along.

Dear Cher, My hair is at the length where I can’t do anything with it. It almost touches my shoulders, and it flops when it should flip. It also needs straightening (I have a deadly permanent and when the weather is damp my hear gets absolutely kinky!). Any help would be appreciated. Super-Curly, Vacaville, Calif.

Cher’s Response:

Dear Super-Curly, First of all, you must let your perm grow out before you can do a thing. Sorry about that—but it is a must. When your hair is grown out, if it is still too curly (and if it “reverts” in damp weather), then you will have to have it professionally straightened at a beauty shop. They have harmless, easy straightening methods—it’s like you will the opposite of a permanent. After your hair is straightened you will just have to experiment with a variety of hair styles and ways of setting your hair. Eventually, you are bound to hit upon one that is just right for you.

Cher Scholar’s Response:

We call them salons now. Who can promise beauty anymore? And what did we know back then from harmless? Girls did plenty of harmful things to their hair and definitely still do. We are always just as safe as we know how to be. Last week I talked about a cool girl I once went to concerts with in St. Louis. When she found out I was a Cher fan she told me she spent her teen years literally using a clothes iron on hair while it was spread out on an ironing board. She was trying to straighten her beautiful, natural curls to get “Cher hair.” Aieee! Insane because in the 80s we were all suffering through perms for curly big 80s hair.

The pointless things we do to impress the boys and the mean girls. And ourselves.

Cher has done some crazy stuff to her own hair. The movie studio tried to color it for Mask and it fell out. So she had to cut it all off into a crew cut that she then dyed blonde and then later skunkified.

Cher learned from television that the safest thing for hair versatility was investing in a wig room. Her long-time hairdresser, Renata Leuschner from the Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, designed many, many wigs for all the Cher TV shows and concert tours.

Cher’s wigs even have names. Cher’s friend Paulette documented the Cher wig room and that fun fact turned into an original fan-fiction comic story in Cher Zine 1, “I Know My First Name is Joan: Perils of a Wig-naping” written and drawn by Julie Wiskirchen.

Now we turn to the questions put to Sonny:

Here’s Sonny to carry on with answers to the letters from those of you who chose to present him with your particular problem.

Dear Sonny, I have a very unusual problem. Instead of being too shy, my boy friend is too forward—and not with me, but with other girls! I mean he digs me, but he is always doing things to hurt me. He’s a real playboy [man-slut, homme fetal, gigolo]. He tries to act like is is 20 (he is 15) and flirts with girls who are three and four years older than he is. He hangs out with a couple of rough guys. I only see him in the summer and on long weekends (because he lives in another city). When we are together, he is very nice. But I’m worried about his “double-life.” Concerned, Chicago, Ill.

Sonny’s Response:

Dear Concerned, You must bear in mind that young men are very [horny, idiotic, maladaptive] impressed by certain outside influences. When he sees these “rough” guys carry on, act tough and flirt—he probably thinks they are hot stuff and then seeks to imitate them. Believe it or not, boys do like to attract attention and this is just one way of doing it. However, since he is very nice and straight with you [Is he though?], he must feel sure that you look up to him and that he doesn’t have to put on an act for you. So, for the time being, let well enough alone. Let him go through these normal changes without giving him a hard time, and he will love you for that.

Cher Scholar’s Response:

I am going to give this response a big, fat F- Sonny. In fact, this is rich coming from Sonny, the one who perfected the art of cheating all while telling America (via Cher) to just calm down. This is like the love-bead necklace of icky-lines. It’s a chain of manipulations, the whopper being “this is just a phase I’m going through.” What exactly does “well enough alone” mean here except big red flags. If this guy, albeit only 15 years old, cannot refrain from getting distracted from a girl he supposedly “digs” but sees only in the summer and on long weekends, that says it all. I grew up with friends who pined for the girls they didn’t get to see nearly enough. The last thing they would have wanted to do would be to blow it with her the few days they actually had.

Blow up the life raft, girl. Strap on the parachute. Time to jump ship on this turkey. Unless you’re into open relationships and then good for you. You do you. But girls I know in open relationships never ever use words like “concerned” unless they are worried about getting knocked-up or developing STDs.

Unfortunately, this red flag for Cher was Sonny himself, the responder! And his ideas are illuminating considering that. Let’s not get further into their private life than we have to. Sonny admitted in his own book he wasn’t faithful to Cher. (There’s even a song he recorded in 1973 about it.) So I don’t think that’s a news flash now. Sonny made Cher very blue at times. When the last straw came, she consoled herself, allegedly, in the arms of a guitar player and then future-Toto keyboardist David Paich (who’s father, Marty, was Sonny & Cher’s band leader; David was also the songwriter / subject of “David’s Song“) and then David Geffen who guided Cher through an aggressive de-coupling from Sonny. As far as we know, none of those men flirted with other women (or men) when they were with Cher. Which is how it should be for Cher and Concerned herself.

Dear Sonny, I am 14 and for the first time in my life I hate school. I don’t like any of my studies, and I always had an interest in some of them before. I can’t finish my homework. I am perfectly satisfied to lie on my bed and listen to music or watch TV. I also day-dream a lot. Please tell me what is wrong with me. Sometimes I just wish I could die. I feel that I am all alone in this. Dawn, Newton, Mass.

Sonny’s Response:

Dear Dawn, Don’t worry—you’re not alone! Probably everybody goes through this stage. I did, and Cher tells me she did. It’s perfectly natural. You are at the stage where you want something very different from the life you have, where you have grown weary of your day-to-day existence. It’s is O.K. to give into your “laziness” to a degree—it will take the pressure off you in other areas. But you must not let this world take you over. There are a number of ways to prevent this. First, take a good look at yourself and analyze your qualities. Everybody is good at something and wants something. Decide where your talent is (writing, painting, singing, or maybe something like cooking or sewing). Anyway, set yourself a goal and go after it. You must fight for it. It is hard, but you certainly don’t want to waste your teen years and wake up one day with no education and no skills. Remember: activity breeds activity—so hang in there!

Cher Scholar’s Response:

So first of all, the suicide crisis line. You can get help if you want and need it. Depression happens to a many of us and it comes in many forms. I grew up in a family with a person with depression and Mr. Cher Scholar has been very public with his experiences with same. In many cases, the cause is chemical and manageable with medication. Like any other part of your body, some things don’t function 100%. Medicine and our understanding of brain activity has come a long way. Others (like me) have more situational experiences with sad. What’s going on in your life?

When you’re a teenager, you have no idea which case is which. There are a ton of situationally depressing things happening to you. You’re not growing up to look like Don Johnson or Cindy Crawford (80s sex symbols for those youngins). You are not turning into a genius like Albert Einstein and you are not going to be the top of your field like a Magic Johnson or a Meryl Streep. That is depressing! Also, the social environment has become suddenly very politically confusing and treacherous. (See mean-girls above.) And you have no skills to navigate these things. And not only that but you are really not all that great at introspection yet.

Plus, if you are at all intuitive, things extra-suck. You kinda know but also never really know. I remember when I was a Junior seeing ahead into my future love life. This was not a psychic vision. This was just intuitive prediction. I was slow socially and very confused but I knew who I was. I could see the troubles play out. And I felt sure I was not strong enough to live through it.

But I misjudged myself in three ways: 1) I turned out to be a lot stronger than I imagined (without even trying), 2) I never knew how funny those upcoming sad things could also sometimes be and humor is a great mitigating factor on hard times, and 3) I never imagined the good stuff that would be happening simultaneously with the bad stuff. Another great mitigating factor.

I also agree with Sonny here that activity will proliferate into plenty of things to do to keep your mind off of self-obsession. I would say I struggled with sadness until I became involved with an animal charity in college and became familiar with more acute suffering than what I had ever been through. For some people, this works: perspective. For others, this does not work, it just piles on the sad to their existing sad.

Some people also call this gratitude but that word sounds too nebulous to me to be very helpful. I think we can be more specific. There is an ironic side of humor to be found in the darkest places (some call this dark humor but its also yin and yang at work and paradox). It also helps to keep tally of the good stuff. I had a therapist who asked me to make a list of the daily good as well as the daily bad because she said the human brain will focus on the bad as a matter of instinctual survival. The list was practice at keeping the good things in play.

There’s also such a thing as intellectual malaise and I can’t tell if Dawn is maybe feeling this. Being unchallenged in school just when your brain is starting to get thinking about interesting things. Sonny’s advice to explore interests is good here. I would add to this: go out into the intellectual world of book readings, museum visiting and wandering around the library. Start following your own trails.

I get sad myself if there’s nothing ahead to “look forward to” like a project or a trip or a new restaurant to try. And then bouts of “the pointlessness of it all” can attack anyone already in a state of sad.

Cher has admitted to suffering from depression, which she says runs in her family. She talked about it a bit after making the Not Commercial album. It was seen most publicly in the 1990s after the Infomercials and all her success in the movies. I contend success itself can be as depressing as failure. You can struggle with a sudden “what’s left for me to do” syndrome.

Cher was also struggling with a debilitating chronic fatigue at the time. All the things.

She went on to the biggest comeback of her career, “Believe,” a record-breaking concert tour, Kennedy Center Honors and practically Sainthood now. Good stuff was awaiting. And bad stuff too. She still struggles with parenting dramas, the death of husbands and friends, the loss of her mother, financial challenges and lawsuits and probably a thousand headaches we don’t even see.

Nobody promised us a rose garden. This is actually classic Sonny “good” advice (because he was brilliant at turning lemons into lemonade): you must not let this world take you over.

Here is a spread of Cher-sadnesses. Sometimes there are happy tears, like Cher crying with pride when her son Chas danced on Dancing with the Stars or Cher crying from being moved at her Kennedy Center Honors.

Then there is acting crying in movies like Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Silkwood, Mask, Suspect, Moonstruck, Mermaids…and the photo that made the cover of most newspapers the day after Sonny’s funeral. Cher-critics loved accusing Cher of fake-sadness at Sonny’s death, but I contend that her acting-cry is always pretty crying and you can definitely tell the difference.

Dear Sonny, I have been going with a boy for a month and he says that he loves me. I feel that I have to break up with him because I don’t want to go steady. I am too young to go steady (14), and there is a lot of fun I want to have before being tied down. How can I tell him this without hurting him! Scared, New York City

Sonny’s Response:

Dear Scared, There is no way to tell him this news that will not hurt him. the sooner you tell him, the better—for the hurt will be a little less. The longer you stay together, the deeper the hurt will be for him. You have phrased it very well in your letter—so just tell him that little piece of truth. Be kind (not cruel) when you tell him.

Cher Scholar’s Response:

Is this the flip side of Concerned above with the playboy boyfriend? I’m sure he was in the same boat. Still so much fun out there to be had.

That aside, I actually have some experience in this no-ready-for-steady thing because I wasn’t ready before the boys were. So although I was interested in them (eventually), the boys were still already more mature than I was. And I wasn’t able to deal with that kind of attention yet. I wanted to be able to deal with it. Everyone else was living Peyton Place soap operas and I felt very left out.

There were two situations I can think of where I got myself into a situation that I felt overwhelmed with and had to break it off. Both happened in high school. One boy’s name was Doug and he was my first kiss (after a football night game by the purple bank of lockers) and I thought he was perfect but quickly found myself out of my depth. I said I wanted to stay friends and he did not take it well, never speaking to me again, except a curt “hi” at our 20th reunion.

All the girls flocked to Mark, another early dating attempt, the year he came to our school as the new kid. He was very handsome and wore the latest 80s parachute pants. This was very thrilling to the girls. I don’t know how many girls he went through, if any, before asking me out (I was clueless, really). But he got really intense really fast. He had some much more experience in all the things. In this case, Mark did not stop talking to me but he kept his distance and we were never part of the same social circles so I never saw him very often after that.

The tragedy of these breakups was that I liked these two boys. And if we had stayed close friends and they had waited, I would have caught up to myself and we could have continued. But so few teenagers are willing to do that. It’s too painful. And you can’t really ask anybody to do that. They either can and do or they don’t.

But I have always regretted my inability to communicate the complexity of my feelings for them (and myself) at that time. Avoidance was all I knew how to do. After all, I didn’t agree to go on a date with them because I didn’t find them handsome and amazing. I didn’t get suddenly disappointed. I was terrified and I had no language to navigate through what we were feeling.

So a lot of pain and drama resulted from misunderstandings and immaturity. It happens every day a million times in high schools all over the world.

Interestingly, Cher usually stays friends with her exes, which has been one of the best things I’ve ever learned from Cher. If you love somebody (if you really do), you can’t just break up with them and stop feeling love. And if you can, did you really love them in the first place? They’re the same person after all. You can distance yourself from toxic people, definitely. And you ex doesn’t (and maybe shouldn’t) turn into your bestie. But usually all the hurt lies in pretending you don’t love someone you really do.

Just keep your feelings straight and keep an open dialogue and that has never served me wrong ever and I wish I had done that with Doug and Mark.

Cher with some of her exes:

I Found Some Blog

Page 2 of 108

Dear Sonny & Cher from 16 Magazine, Part 12

Dear Sonny & Cher from 16 Magazine, Part 11

Cher’s Hawaiian Meatballs

Stealing Fandom

Sonny & Cher Live in 1972

Dear Sonny & Cher from 16 Magazine, Part 10

Dear Sonny & Cher from 16 Magazine, Part 9

Dear Sonny & Cher from 16 Magazine, Part 8

It’s a Good Day To Be a Cher Fan

Dear Sonny & Cher from 16 Magazine, Part 7

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