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Programs for The Cher Show

June 14, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

I keep hearing rumors that the US traveling-version of the Broadway musical The Cher Show is set to launch. Fall 2023 is the latest story. But the show’s own site still lists the old start date of Fall 2021!

The Broadway version of the show opened on December 3, 2018 with Stephanie J. Block, Teal Wicks and Miraela Diamond as the three Chers, and when I went to see it in January of 2019, the programs weren’t available yet. Which seemed incredible since any fan would want a program to a Broadway show, at minimum.

And then I forgot about it. So it was a long time, (maybe even after the show closed), that I ordered my copy from the online store.

When the traveling UK show started up in 2022, their program was ready right away and I mailed away for a few of their show’s artifacts.

These programs are very different. The shows were different. Different cast, sets and costumes. And I think their programs reflect those differences.

The Broadway program has a beautiful design, the three stylized Cher drawings, very colorful incarnations. There’s a emoji-strewn message from Cher inside. The program is maybe a little too much like a Cher concert program; it has the mandatory two-page collage of her record album covers. Always impressive to see, but not entirely germane in this book. There are shots of the cast, with quotes and song titles to situate them in the show. There’s a big centerpiece, fold-out of the Bob Mackie costumes. On the one hand, this almost puts too much emphasis on the clothes, (Mackie here calls the costumes “get-ups”), but in light of the dead, old critics view in the 1970s that Cher was “just a clothes hanger,” this doubling-down feels alright.

There are lists of Cher’s hits and awards, Bob Mackie sketches for the show, (little art pieces themselves). One-hundred costumes were created for the show, including a recreation of the hole-fit which Mackie always calls Swiss Cheese. Mackie retells the story of meeting Cher and what a young “sprite” she was back then. How daring she has always been.

There are some great shots of the sets. But one of the best things about this programs is the list of accolades about Cher.

TV producer Flody Suarez talks about germinating the idea 17 years prior. (Didn’t the Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour producers Chris Bearde and Allan Blye once try to mount a Sonny & Cher musical back in the 1980s or 90s?)

Suarez went to New York and met people who knew people on Broadway who got the show hooked up with stage producer Jeffrey Seller and Rick Elice of another successful jukebox musical Jersey Boys. He says Rick Elice demanded great performers and nice people. With Cher involved, it was easier to get Bob Mackie involved.

And what about Cher? Suarez talks about her power, her vulnerability, tenacity, kindness and originality.

In Rick Elice’s notes, he talks about a visit from Cher in the summer of 2015 when his life was at its lowest ebb due to the death of his long-time partner, how Cher helped him through it. He talked about Cher as “a minister” who is “attentive to people.” Someone who is kind, thoughtful, fun, generous, surprising, full of variety.

The choreographer Christopher Gattelli talks about Cher as an inspiration, her confidence, strength and resilience. He sees her as a kick-ass singer and actress and a goddess warrior.

Music supervisor Daryl Waters talks about hearing “Gypsies Tramps and Thieves” as a young music nerd and dissecting it. He calls Cher caring, funny, poignant, irreverent.

(These are some good words.)

Director Jason Moore talks about trying to create an old variety show set and how they tried to pick the songs that would tell Cher’s life in less than six hours. He felt the theme of the show was about facing fears in order to grow and be stronger. Oh, and glitter. Glitter with intimacy and authenticity, how they tried to embody Cher’s essence without impersonation.

He sees Cher as “a beautifully complex woman, larger than life and a deeply authentic human being, spectacular, extravagant, intimate and emotional.”

Set designers Christine Jones and Brett J. Banakis talk about wanting an over-the-top look of glamour (because we want to see Cher big and strong) but also intimate sets (because we want to see her up-close and vulnerable). Cher has covered so many years and so many mediums, they said. She’s “fierce.” They wanted to use mirrors to highlight the multiple Chers, sometimes struggling through the fragmentation of the world. They needed flexibility with the lighting and they didn’t want to upstage the “get-ups.” They call the show a “kaleidoscopic ride through a psychological closet.”

Lighting designer Kevin Adams talks about bringing together a contrast between the dark-haired Cher and the big bright spectacle.

It often seemed the US show struggled to show Cher’s legitimacy (or a jukebox musical’s legitimacy for that matter). The UK show never seemed to face such a struggle, more willing did their press seem to just just let go and have some Cher-fun. This might be because the UK show traveled and the US show was ensconced in the Great White Way.

As I’m working on a Katharine Hepburn project at the moment, I can’t help but be reminded of the differences between her Broadway and London Shakespeare reviews similarly. You’d think if anyone would be overly serious about Shakespeare…except the US critics couldn’t get over Hepburn’s New England accent doing Shakespeare and the London critics couldn’t care less. They loved seeing Hepburn do Shakespeare.

So it was much more pleasant to watch the UK show publicity unfold. And I love the Broadway Chers but casting people of color was brilliant. (The three UK Chers were Millie O’Connel, Danielle Steers and Debbie Kurup.)

Their program has ads in the front and back advertising jukebox musicals about The Osmonds, Tina Turner, an unfortunate musicalization of Pretty Woman, and the choreographer Oti Mabuse’s own show. This program goes more into the biography of Cher (because maybe they’re not as familiar with it?) which calls Cher a “rock and roll survivor…a prize fighter.” The bio goes into Sonny’s unfaithfulness and how he absconded with all their money . It states Cher’s freedom cost her over a million dollars.

There’s a page of movie highlights where Cher talks about being a bumper car (“I won’t stop.) This program also talks about Cher’s iconic impact on LGBTQ, her struggles with alienation, mistreatment and marginalization. They talk about her sass and style, how she tells it like it is, her survival. They point out her role as a lesbian in the movie Silkwood, her relationship to her son Chaz and how she supported drag queens back to her 1979 show that brought the art of drag into the mainstream, the influence of her style on people like Kim Kardashian and Miley Cyrus.

There’s a page of celebrities praising Cher: Gwen Stefani (who credits Cher for making us strong and true to ourselves), Beyonce, Sarah Paulson, Christina Aguilera and Rob Halford, whose comments are the best and most specific. He says she has the “most beautiful voice…beautiful, beautiful texture in her voice.”

The production notes in this version talk about the show’s color palette, how Rick Elice made a visit to Cher’s own closet to generate ideas about the story, (and being in the closet is such a wonderful metaphor here). Set designer Tom Rogers talk about wanting to avoid making the show “a soulless presentation of her songs.”

What’s great about this program is the 4 pages of behind-the-scenes rehearsals, it gives list of acts and numbers, longer credit pages (like a Playbill), all the actors and dancers, everyone’s Tweet handle, 5 pages of the creative bios and 1 page of production credits.

Although I love the design of the Broadway program, it’s very slim in information and beyond words, doesn’t take you behind the curtain. It feels bare bones compared to the thicker, more outgoing UK program.

I’m looking forward to what the traveling US show programs will look like. Fingers crossed that even happens.

Information about both shows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cher_Show_(musical)

The Mythology of Cher Breaking Up Rock Bands

June 12, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

So I’ve been in a bad mood lately. My job has turned into a mess of chaos. And in the past, when work turned difficult, something else good was happening to distract me. And visa versa, if my life was, for a while, a trainwreck, work would be solid and fulfilling. One part could always carry me through the other.

Well, not so much right now. And it seems when you’re in a bad place, grumpy ideas seem to come to you you’re like a big, grumpy magnet. So over the weekend I started thinking about the ways Rock Music Culture has slighted Cher over the last 60 years (not to mention some of her fans).

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

What is that even? What is the trumped-up scarcity of yearly-open induction spots even about? My friend Coolia just visited Cleveland for some Cardinal baseball games, visiting my parents and going to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She recently sent me a photograph of an electronic, daily voting board there where visitors can vote for their favorite artists and it shows the top ranking votes (Cher was #8 that day between Soundgarden and Weird Al) but what is that board even doing? Except manufacturing controversy between fans like the scam it is? Either the place is a serious museum to rock and roll (by which there would be no formal inductions of anything, just the facts of a music genre) or it’s a circus. It has chosen to be a circus.

The Sticky Mythology of Yoko Ono

When I was in third grade, some boys in Mrs. Hopson’s class were so stoked about the new band KISS. Why eight year old boys fell for KISS in the first place I will never understand; but I overheard them saying how much they hated Cher and how she was going to break up the band.

Now, I was in on the downlow about Cher at this time so I just fumed in silence. But my brother was a Beatle fan so even I believed in the Yoko Ono Myth at the time. Still, I thought, maybe Cher was performing a public service here. (My friend Coolia is a KISS fan too, so I can’t tread too far here). The point is I’ve come to learn a few facts about how the Cher entourage, (which is not quite so large as to produce the kind of shock-and-awe the Elizabeth Taylor’s entourage once did but is still probably significantly big), became embedded in three bands over the decades, The Allman Brothers Band, KISS and Bon Jovi.

In the first case, Allman Brothers band fans were just as upset about the new presence of Cher in their lives as the KISS fans were. And to be fair, little Cher fans were none too pleased about the situation either. But Cher spent a lot of time with that band and according to the book, Midnight Riders: The Story of the Allman Brothers Band by Scott Freeman, everything Cher learned from David Geffen about extricating from bad music contracts she passed on to the Allman Brothers and they directly benefited from this and appreciated it. Oh and Dickey Betts married Cher’s personal-assistant-slash-best-friend Paulette. So if a band wanted to spend less time with Cher, would it marry her BFF?

Nobody from the band has spoken particularly poorly about Cher over the years, if you discount Gregg himself who has publicly said Cher has no talent but was “good in the sack.”

And as a sidebar, in times like these you have to give it to Sonny, who’s heterosexuality a plethora of women could attest to. Most heterosexual men don’t really get Cher although they may find her attractive. This seems a pretty average response from straight men. But Sonny was different. He saw what Cher fans see. You have to give him some kind of super-sensory credit for that. Sexist Italian guy that everyone agreed he could be, he thought Cher was more talented than anybody else did. And he gets a star for that.

Moving on to KISS, shortly after Gene Simmons started dating Cher (and the third grade boys lost their KISS-loving minds), Paul Stanley started dating Cher’s sister, Georgeanne, who went on to marry actor Michael Madsen and after that a man who was the head of Cher’s security team. So even small companies could find themselves enmeshed in the dating life of the Cher entourage. Turns out Cher is extremely likeable if you believe anyone who talks about her. Beside the point, because the determining factor was always Cher’s perceived coolness. She wasn’t cool enough to be dating Gregg Allman or Gene Simmons.

Now we can skip Les Dudek because nobody even knew they were dating anyway, or were in a band together, or that Les Dudek was between bands when they met, or where anyone would go to overhear Dudek fans kvetching about Cher. I guess you could argue that Cher broke up the band Dudek was in with Cher, but that would still not be a Yoko-Ono-breakup per se in the sense that fans everywhere worldwide were deeply unconcerned.

Moving on to Bon Jovi, Cher dated Richie Sambora sometime after Jon Bon Jovi produced “We All Sleep Alone” and her 1987 remake of “Bang Bang.” So Cher was not quite the anathema to members of this band either. I honestly don’t remember what Bon Jovi fans thought about this. I should ask my friend Christopher who wholeheartedly believes Jon Bon Jovi is the most attractive man ever to breathe earthly oxygen. He also likes Cher so…I don’t imagine he was losing his mind at the time. But I’ll follow up on any concerns he might have had. At least Cher was moderately more cool in the late 1980s than she was in the mid-to-late 1970s vis-à-vis rock-music fans, at least cool enough to have her videos appear on MTV and not to have been relegated to the decidedly-un-hip VH-1.

But we should take comfort because I feel there is still time for Cher to break up a rock band. In fact, if she waits for when she turns 80 years old to do this, preferably with a young band of twenty-somethings I would be very pleased. Because it would hit a lot of rock’s stereotypes at the same time. And ironically, it would feel very rock and roll.

Cher Scholar’s Ultimate Cher Comp

April 12, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 2 Comments

So when Robrt Pela and I were finishing our Quagmire of Comps project, we talked about our dream Cher comp. I have probably made about ten mix-tape Cher comps in my lifetime (not including new YouTube and steaming mixes). I mean the olde timey cassette tapes. This was back in the day when there was not a single comprehensive, across-the-many-labels compilation to be purchased. My last cassette mix was made in my late 20s and even had a fold-out of liner notes written by me in a moment of prenatal-Cher-scholaring.

By now, we’ve had a few good comps out there and it’s no longer a matter of wanting to see all her hits represented in one place. I’ve also done my share of sharing what I thought were the best songs (see the links above). So lately I’ve been creating thematic comps, like Love Songs, Philosophical Songs, Girl Power Songs.

As Robrt and I were talking about the Ultimate Comp I was thinking about songs that define Cher in some way, like personally. Which is very tricky. Somewhat newb interviewers since “Believe” have had a tendency to try to ask Cher what certain songs mean to her personally and she invariably responds like the person has just landed with that question from Mars. This line of questioning inevitably tanks. This is not an artist trying to reveal biography in her music (at least when taken as a whole). Her roots are too vaudevillian, too show-biz, variety-show for that.

But…fans like a little peak into the psyche of their stars from time to time, even from artists who don’t traffic in such disclosure. So it took me about ten minutes to come up with this ultimate bio mix. Then I was reminded of Biograph, Bob Dylan’s 53-song Box Set comp from 1985. In my mind, that was the first box set I ever saw on the shelves and I immediately pined for the Cher! Box! Set! And as you might recall, about a zillion box sets did get released, so many that they had to devote a special bin for those things. But that box set of Cher’s best/rare/popular songs never did come through (although we did get a cool wooden box up-sale with lyrics on tarot cards for the Love Hurts album in 1991).

Although my biographical framework is a risky premise for a compilation list because album (and TV show) producers like Sonny and Snuff Garrett controlled her song selection for decades, there is much we can learn from the songs Sonny wrote for Cher, (some based loosely on their biography), songs they both selected for her to sing, songs she’s revisited over and over again through the years and songs Cher actually wrote, (what few there are). I didn’t include all of the songs Cher wrote in my bio mix, but you can see good summaries of those online:

A lot of my cassette mixes were called “This Is Cher” in a kind of a Whitmanian Leaves of Grass repurposing. That title has always felt jazzy and back-door to me, a bit snooty so it works in both in a post-modern, wink-wink kind of way and yet still pretty earnestly (which is Gen X perfection in tone right there). But there have already been a few “This Is Cher” comps on the market and so I’ve appended “(For Reals)” to mine with the idea that this song list is a bit more of a personal peek into Cher’s inner life.

And lastly, I’ve broken the list of songs down by decade segments to wishfully indicate separate vinyl chapters, like those old, coveted multi-album box sets with their vinyl-cover-sized liner-note booklets. Oooh! That was nice!

The mix can be found on YouTube, the only streaming platform that includes Cher’s TV performances and her self-re-released Warner Bros albums from the mid 1970s.

1960s

Baby Don’t Go
Right before Sonny & Cher, as Caesar & Cleo, launched their recording act, Cher’s mother, disturbed by Sonny’s advanced age, physically extricated the underage Cher from Sonny’s apartment. They were basically just roommates at that point but this separation allegedly marks the point where Sonny began to miss Cher and began to see her as a girlfriend. This song and Sonny’s choice to sing Bob Lind’s “Cheryl’s Going Home” (not in my mix) possibly reflect this time of separation.
I Got You Babe
Sonny always spoke of this song as mythologically personal, referencing their time trying to break into show business. He casts himself as “young” like Cher which served him well until it didn’t seem so plausible anymore. Cher still calls it “my song.” When Sonny introduces the song on their first live album and in various television performances, he counsels her to, “Sing your song.”
Hello
Extremally personal, this is Sonny’s attempt to pull back the veil and show “the people” who Sonny & Cher really were, just everyday people. But in doing so, he has to draw Cher out of her shell and she seems highly uncomfortable with their improvisational conversation.
Sunny
The is 100% re-textualizing as Sonny with an innocent but truthfully reverent delivery.
Just You
You have to switch their roles here but Sonny has written a song about their relationship and gallantly given Cher the prettier part. We now know from various sources (including both Sonny and Cher) that Sonny didn’t find Cher very attractive or smart and she found him very attractive and very smart; and although it’s hard to believe, Sonny was the one making eyes at girls more his type (big-breasted blondes) and Cher was, in reality, the jealous partner. Very telling this one.
You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me
Cher sang this song with both Sonny and Gregg Allman, like two husband bookends. She must have revisited the song officially on vinyl for a reason.
Why Don’t They Let Us Fall in Love
The romance of Sonny & Cher was hindered by a big naysayer, Cher’s mother, understandably upset by the fact that her underage daughter was living with a man 11 years older. This song puts an innocent spin on that story but there’s a little grain of truth in there, at least from the perspective of an innocent teenage girl in the throes of a massive love obsession.
But You’re Mine
See “Just You” and “I Got You Babe” above. All the same things. I don’t love this song, tbh, and I keep wanting to take it off this mix.
Little Man
Sonny wasn’t very tall and talking about this was a schtick in their act for 12 years.
It’s the Little Things
See “Just You” above. All the same things.
Don’t Talk to Strangers
Sonny’s portrayal of Cher as innocent doe.
Trust Me
This one is interesting in light of the fact that Sonny asked Cher to trust him in all aspects of their business and personal life. Cher didn’t put up any resistance to this idea and unfortunately Sonny was cheating her in both regards. Both ironic and true.
Just a Name
See “I Got You Babe” and also a reference to their propensity for unique names, their own and their children’s. Sonny on TV claimed that Cher picked out the name for their child Chastity but all of Sonny’s own children’s names (before and after Cher) begin with ‘ch’ and three of the four are also unusual names. They say Cher was allegedly as unenthused about making this movie as her self-character seems to be. Closeups on their wedding rings.
Ma Piano (Per Non Svegliarmi)
Someone recently posted a video on Tic Tok showing how Cher still remembers some of the lyrics to this song. Kind of interesting, that.

1970s (Part 1)

Danny Boy
Cher says in the introduction to the song on her first live album that this song is her favorite song. She gives it a pretty emotional delivery (for her anyway).
Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves
Although this fictional song become Cher’s second signature song, there’s a bit of the gypsy, tramp and thief in her, too, which is why the femme-fetale trope keeps recurring in her movies, television skits and music.
United We Stand
By the end of the 1960s, Sonny & Cher did in fact have their backs against the wall and they stood by each other, despite an almost-bankruptcy, infidelities and retaliatory infidelities and a career nadir.
Vamp (The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour)
Cher pulled off the ultimate portrayal of history’s vampish heroines and villains on the Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. It felt a bit natural.
My Funny Valentine (Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour)
Although if we look to “Just You” and “It’s the Little Things” as an example, we could very well transpose the parts again, but by now Cher has redefined what it means to be beautiful in America, especially for brunettes and raven-haired ladies. Sonny can’t be anything but the also-ran from now on, a role that didn’t sit with him as well backstage as it did on-stage.
You’ve Got a Friend/Where You Lead (The Very First Glen Campbell TV Special)
I don’t know why I included this one except that it indicates something personal in their relationship in the way they sing it, like Cher’s way of singing nasally like Sonny when they get to “Where You Lead” because where Sonny led, Cher would follow.
Living in a House Divided
And then the shit hits the fan. The year this record was made they imploded behind the scenes. Snuff Garrett might not have chosen the song for that reason, but its drama mapped perfectly to the situation. Except that nobody out in the Nielsen audience knew. It was a big secret for a year and a half. No one wanted to see it coming, even as Cher was already singing break-up songs.
David’s Song
Unknown to her fans, this was a song for Cher’s new love, David Paich. The song was also written by him (which is kind of weird and indicates he was trying to hint at her continued dependency on Sonny, if not professionally, a bit emotionally as well).
Chastity Sun
Cher’s re-wrote the lyrics to the Seals and Crofts song for Chastity and her version describes some sweet feelings of new-motherhood.
The Greatest Show on Earth
Truth be told, Sonny & Cher were putting on a master-class of acting every week on their variety show. Barely speaking offstage, they seemed perfectly fine on the air.
Mama Was a Rock and Roll Singer Papa Used to Write All Her Songs (Parts 1 and 2)
Sonny’s mean-spirited kiss-off song about Cher’s leaving him. The fact that he got Cher to sing these lyrics still blows my mind. If that doesn’t prove to you love is blind (and deaf), what could?
Didn’t We (Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour)
Cher’s heartfelt farewell song to Sonny in return.
Rock and Roll Doctor
Cher wants to sing rock and roll already….like since the psychedelic era!
Love Hurts
Cher will return again to this one. It’s a rare soul-baring moment.
Stars
Fame can be challenging. Cher sings about it here in a remarkably intellectual Janis Ian cover.

1970s (Part 2)

Love Song (Cher)
Cher’s relationship to Elton John has been interesting and semi-personal since the mid-1970s. She records his songs, he sings like her sometimes and writes songs about her. They also wrote a song together and have appeared together on Divas Live and Joan Rivers.
All Is Fair in Love (Cher)
Cher’s first torch-song choice after starting her new solo show. Possibly a reality-check message to America.
Resurrection Shuffle (with Tina Turner) (Cher)
The whole reinvention thing.
Keep the Customer Satisfied (Cher)
Cher solo is getting more criticism now that she’s a single lady. It’s hard to keep everyone satisfied on and off the stage.
Two of Us/We Can Work It Out (The Sonny & Cher Show)
Sweetness in how Sonny & Cher can pick it up years later. Professionalism? Affection? They keep revisiting this medley on their variety show episodes so they must like it. “Two of Us” also harkens back to their early relationship and Cher’s description of how creative they were together at home.
I Love Makin’ Love to You
Cher described sex with Gregg Allman as “hot.”
Island
But Cher’s intense fame and Allman’s pharmaceutical habits made their relationship rocky. Cher picked this song thinking maybe a bona fide island would help.
You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me
Cher revisits the song with Allman. Totally different style and tone. Interesting evolution of relating.
A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes (Cher…Special)
Cher delves into her childhood in this 1978 special and this Disney song describes a facet of her somewhat dreamy childhood self.
Guitar Groupie
Cher loves guitars, btw. Gene Simmons can be heard singing a line in the song.
It’s Too Late to Love Me Now
At the end of her second marriage, some heartbreak.
My Song (Too Far Gone)
More specific, Cher-co-authored heartbreak.
Ain’t Nobody’s Business (Cher and Other Fantasies)
This song comes up and up again. “If I want to put my tits on my back…”
Shoppin’
Originally this album was written to give audiences a behind-the-scenes, reality-album version of Cher. The label wanted her to dance; she wanted to rock. This album happened as a tug-of-war. Cher loves to shop. Some nice Luther Vandross bopping to Cher’s shopping.
Mirror Image
Cher compares CHER to Cher. And laments the tabloids.
Outrageous
See “Aint Nobody’s Business” above. Also contains a nod to Bob Mackie. “God, my mother told me I was outrageous and she was right.”
Hell on Wheels
Cher was all up into the late-1970s roller-skating craze that had even me flying around Coachlite skating rink as often as I could. She had famous, exclusive skating parties at which costume malfunctions happened to her.

1980 – 1990s

Young and Pretty (Black Rose)
Getting old in Hollywood for women. The pressure of staying pretty.
Take it to the Limit (Celebration at Caesars)
Cher also calls this one of her favorite songs.
Out Here On My Own (Celebration at Caesars)
Although Cher had launched a solo-TV show without Sonny, she credited this tour/concert as being the point where she really felt alone out there for the first time as a solo performer.
More Than You Know (Celebration at Caesars)
This song comes up again and again and again on TV variety shows, TV specials and concerts. That could indicate she really feels this one.
Heart of Stone
Getting jaded in life. Cher follows politics and it can get depressing.
After All
Cher really fought to record this song as a demo so I feel it had some resonance for her. She always includes it in her live shows and never cuts it out after the first leg like she tends to do with the show’s other ballad, “The Way of Love.”
I Got You Babe (with Beevis & Butthead)
“We need a chick that used to be married to a dork and so now she’s all wild and stuff.” To be honest, Cher admitted she was kinda wild before Sonny. The fact that she left home at 16 and already had a sexcapade with Warren Beatty under her belt….kinda wild already one could argue. Cher is also distancing herself here from an earlier incarnation. At the end there’s a reference to Cher’s tendency to date younger men.
Tougher Than The Rest (Heart of Stone Tour)
Cher is one tough cookie…
Many Rivers to Cross (Heart of Stone Tour)
…but also vulnerable too, moving through the world with some humility (and pride).
A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes (Pediatric AIDS Benefit)
See same song above. The child is strong in this one!
Nature Boy (Sonny’s Death Special)
Cher’s chosen homage to Sonny after his death. Some people were upset about Cher’s tributes and lamentations when Sonny died due to some previous slurs (see Beevis & Butthead above) but honestly their relationship was very, very complicated and probably not easily understood by everybody.

Fin de siècle

Sisters of Mercy
Cher wrote this song based on her mother’s stories of Cher’s time at a Catholic home as a baby and how the church tried to remove Cher’s mother’s custody due to their poverty.. It also ties into Cher’s own experiences with nuns at Catholic school.
When the Money’s Gone
Cher has a big entourage and staff. This would make anyone wonder about their role as Sugar Mama.
Human (Stuck on You)
Humility. Yeah.
You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me (Burlesque)
Not ready to retire.

Memory and the Space Shuttle Challenger

March 23, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone in the library was upset just immediately then.

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

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

A stiff, rubber o-ring.

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least that’s how I remember it.

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

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

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

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

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

Second disaster quietly averted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deep thoughts, me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

from me.

God. Dammit!

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

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

Sigh. Ok. Enough of that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, I do not.

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

Proust and the Fan Squeal

March 23, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 2 Comments

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

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

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

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

It was great!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because bitch, please…

You should be a connoisseur not a sentimentalist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because I can.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking On Cher Compilation Albums

March 3, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

I am very excited about this unveiling.

A few years ago, Robrt Pela suggested we compile a list of all of Cher’s compilation albums for the Cher Scholar site. So we did that. And it was quite a mind trap, I must say. Part of the project was culling out what was NOT a comp, like the three albums you see to the left, little imposter stowaways on the massive freighter of Cher comps.

We’d like to take you on the fantastical journey of our compilizing . So first we will summarize the experience of the toil and trouble.

Robrt: Here’s my postmortem paragraph about being a Cher Comp Wrangler. (Where’s my hazard pay?)

So, first of all, I have to thank you for your enthusiasm for this project. It would have been fair of you to say to me, “I think your desire to obsessively list all the Cher compilations is mad, and I don’t want to be friends with you any more.”

Also, thank you for letting me maniacally copy-edit this list.

So, a couple of things I noticed: One is that there are variations of variations of variations in the Cher Comp World. And also that I didn’t find it much fun tracking down some of this stuff. Like, knowing the difference between the Malaysian reissue of the seventeenth iteration of the Outrageous bootleg and the UK import of the original reissue of Holdin’ Out for Love, (which originated in Denmark as a repackaging of a Cher hits package from Canada) didn’t improve my life.

Here’s another thing: The Cher Comp Universe exploded in 2000, for obvious reasons: “Believe” was a monster, and every label, label subsidiary, and bootlegger wanted to cash in. All those annoying Holdin’ Out for Love comp variations started up around then.

Finally, all the similar comp titles and the variations on cover art made me want to jump off the balcony—and we live on the 14th floor. I mean, all those Golden Greats and Golden Hits and This is Chers were bad enough, but when they started swapping covers with one another, I thought I was going to burst into flames.

Which is pretty much what happened when I discovered that this already-weird Imperial/Casablanca mishmash comp called (of course) All I Really Want to Do has a variation cover that features two photographs of Cher THAT AREN’T REALLY HER.

After that I was like, “I’m done.”

Mary: I do feel your pain. While I was finally setting this all up in HTML I was losing the thread of my existence a little bit.

And as I remember it, you suggested this project and I was all like “I dunno…that seems hard.” And you were like, “We’re doing this!” And I was like…”Okay. ”

But once we got going, it was a lot of fun (and very funny). I am still surprised it took us so long to complete the project but then I didn’t imagine there would be so many comps, so many details to track and so many life things that would intervene.

Parsing through my own collection was sobering. Why did I buy all these? Then looking for the photos was particularly maddening because many of the titles from different labels were duplicated. These aren’t respectable artifacts summarized on Wikipedia. I thank Discogs Music Marketplace for their very helpful database of details and photos.

The most fun for me was tallying up the statistics and organizing them (why so many German comps? Why do the Germans love “Holdin’ Out for Love” as a title so much? Because they love the song?).

And it’s worth mentioning, a compilation cataloguer’s work is never done. There are still a few comps in here that will need further research and I’m interested to see how streaming comps will evolve.

So without further ado:

The Cher Compilations: The breakdown by year, country, era depicted, hits, oddities, sound quality and our ratings.

Spoiler alert: there are 147.

The Discussion: Robert and I spent an evening talking about the Comp albums, our favorites and what makes us crazy about some of them.

Variety Show Review Is Back Up

February 28, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

And we’re back! Oy. That was a painful hiatus.

I have missed deconstructing these shows.

We pick it up again with episode 8 from The Sonny & Cher Show in 1976.

Keep checking back to the TV Variety Shows and Specials page for more episodes in the coming weeks.

We’ve Moved!

February 10, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

The timeline of the move looked like this:

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

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

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

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

Sigh.

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

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

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

Goodbye to Georgia Holt

December 13, 2022 / Cher Scholar / 1 Comment

I still haven't sorted out my websites due to a few setback this winter. So I haven't been able to blog about Cher's new perfumes or her new boyfriend (Quel scandale!); but the loss of Cher's mother, Georgia Holt, at 96 could not go without a moment of tribute.

Cher's mother lived a very interesting life, starting out as a country singer with Georgia's father at age 6 and at age 10 playing with Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys. (Wills actually has a mural in my family seat of Roy, New Mexico…Harding County has gone a bit mural crazy the last 20 years).

Georgia Holt then came to Los Angeles to try to break into acting and she got by with modeling jobs. Although she never "made it big" she seemed to know many movers and shakers. She was friends with many people (or at least their wives) who would go on to play a big role in Cher's career, including Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records who she spoke to about Cher before Sonny & Cher signed with Atco Records and also Robert Altman's wife who she notified about Cher's attempts to break into acting which led to Robert Altman's "discovery" of Cher as an actress in the early 1980s. Georgia did score some small roles in the 1950s and 60s, but her best role was probably that of Cher's elegant mother, a role which had its ups and downs (she wasn't at all on board with the Sonny thing at first) but a performance which seemed to end with love, grit and style.

How many mother's of celebrities have their own Wikipedia page? Or have their obits in The Guardian, People Magazine and Rolling Stone?

Here are some pictures of Georgia with Cher's father, John Sarkisian, and Georgia with the closest thing she ever did of a book about Cher, Star Mothers, which she organized in conjunction with other celebrity moms of the 1980s,

Anyway, ever since Cher has been tweeting about the precarious health of her mother this year I've had this poem rambling around in my head for Georgia and her girls…

Three Peas

Three peas in a pod were living in the grass
at the edge of the yard where the street flows by.

Three peas sitting in a pod like a green canoe
with a swanky soft-top the peas could open and close.

These peas could pose in their pod or unwind
or hole up in the rain or wind or sunshine.

Three peas brushing their hair, painting
their nails, singing with their pea mouths.

Three peas in a pod sitting in the grass
as the whole world floated by.

Fast cars came by with handsome men,
other cars brought even more interesting men,

and girls of every kind strutting down the street
in sequined suits. There were mustached ring leaders

and twirling disco balls, long parades with harlequins
on stilts, jugglers in spotlights and water in the gutter

that glittered for three peas who sat by the curb
where the world seems to come to you.

Three peas in a pod would dance and sing
and dress-up and gossip. And then

one day the oldest pea left the pod
and two peas were left alone

and there was too much space and so they floated
and spun in slow motion until the time passed

and they could settle back in the pod
near where the world flowed by on the street.

And fast cars drove by with handsome men,
girls of every kind and the grass sparkled with dew.

There are two peas in a pod now in the grass by the curb
where the world seems to come to you.

When I created this blog back in 2008, I jokingly created a tag for all non-Cher posts called "peripherals" (for news about family members, co-workers), but this is like The Peripheral, literally the origin peripheral and a person who had a very interesting life in her own right.

What always struck me about Georgia was her effortless regality. This is my favorite late-era photo of her because it represents the way she held herself. That swell of hair! This was taken the day Cher placed her handprints in Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

As the t-shirt above says, "Bitch, please. I made Cher."

We’re Moving

October 31, 2022 / Cher Scholar / 2 Comments

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

Brave new start.

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

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

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

It could be worse…always.

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

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

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

I Found Some Blog

Page 6 of 107

Programs for The Cher Show

The Mythology of Cher Breaking Up Rock Bands

Cher Scholar’s Ultimate Cher Comp

Memory and the Space Shuttle Challenger

Proust and the Fan Squeal

Taking On Cher Compilation Albums

Variety Show Review Is Back Up

We’ve Moved!

Goodbye to Georgia Holt

We’re Moving

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