If you grew up in St. Louis, you probably shuttled relatives downtown to take them up into The Gateway Arch (gateway to the West) about a dozen or so times in your life.
And if you were my Dad, you’d have those relatives sit through the making-of-the-arch documentary, a 60s-era movie that ended with the last steel section being placed at the top of the arch, all to great fanfare and a building engineer’s educational-film voice pronouncing, “And then the thing was done!”
So I now feel compelled to say this phrase every time we hit a milestone with any of Cher Scholar’s enterprises.
I have finished synopsizing the variety shows of Cher and Sonny & Cher: https://www.cherscholar.com/the-tv-variety-shows-and-specials/. The first episode synopsis was posted way back on January 15, 2019! It’s taken me 4 years , 6 months and 3 days!
Huuuuge thank you goes to Jay Pickering, who contacted me early on in the process and has been helping me fill in the gaps with his personal knowledge and a collection of TV Guides.
You know Cher fans are special. I’ve met good fans everywhere for many artists of all kinds in many cities. I love to talk to fans. But Cher fans are another thing. Cher fans don’t posture. They’re not possessive. At least the ones I know. They help each other find stuff. They know what it means to be an outsider. That’s probably why they like Cher in the first place.
Another thing I love about Cher’s fans, they have specialties. There are Cher doll specialists, movie specialists, TV show specialists. In music there are even subcategory specialists: singles specialists, album specialists, compilation specialists. We are truly an enterprise of an enterprise.
And I love you guys! It makes being a fan so much more fun.
I feel both happy and sad to be at the end of this project. Doing this every week has gotten me through some hard moments over the last few years: Covid lockdowns, my parents both getting Covid at the same time and other personal challenges I’ve been experiencing. I’ve been able to come to this project when I needed a pick-me-up and I will miss it. I’ll miss watching Sonny & Cher again every week.
But I’m also pretty amazed I finished. Here’s an animated gif that shows how I feel right about now:
I still have a lot of cleanup to do on the episode pages, replacing broken links to videos with the show videos Cher has been publishing on her own YouTube and I have some episodes to revisit and refine.
It’s been amazing watching the evolution of these shows. Sonny & Cher came a long way from Jimmy Durante to Tina Turner, from “The Beat Goes On” to “Teach Me Tonight,” from “You Made Me Love You” to “Danny’s Song.”
I hope this catalogue will be useful to fans and future Cher scholars.
