Cher, The Partridge Family Album and The Great American Themes

As I started working on this post last Friday, I wasn't sure which blog it would end up in (the Cher blog or the poetry blog). I feel the topic is halfway between writing the great American story/novel/movie/song/poem and the Cher blog where I could start to talk about Cher’s major career themes. I decided on the later since I’m starting to work on a Cher book divided by categories which are much more generalized and less specific than the Great American Themes but that are worth looking at through the kaleidoscope that is Cher.

To date I’ve finished reading 61 books on pop culture topics. Which is nothing, by the way, a drop in the bucket in the proliferation of pop culture scholarship these days. Academic Pop Culture Studies have exploded in the last 30 years, ever since “the Madonna essay.” We can get degrees in this now? Indeed. Not when I was a kid.

But pop culture pontificating has basically borrowed the existing think-tanking apparatus from the study of literature, which I did get a degree in so... yes ma, my indulgent book-club degree may just be of use here.

Here is a small sampling of the Cher-book categories to give you a taste of what the book will cover:

• Feminism
  • Women on TV in the 1970s
  • Cher as Drag
• High vs. Lowbrow Culture
  • Camp Culture
• Appeal as Gay Icon
• Movies & TV
  • The Male Gaze, MTV and the Female Gaze Looking Back
• Power Pop/Girl Music
• The Diva/Icon/Unruly Woman
• Fan Culture

As of now there are 17 major categories. From the beginning I realized my weak spot would be writing about music, a category I don’t feel particularly knowledgeable about or good at writing about; so two years ago I started reading books around that, which led to a few minor obsessions: a search for Lester Bangs' essays, Lester Bangs' reviews of Sonny & Cher, and women writing about rock music.

It also lead to three rock histories, Good Booty by Ann Powers (a history of popular American music through the lens of sex), How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll by Elijah Wald (worst click-bait title of a book I’ve ever seen…but nonetheless good alternative history of American popular music from a perspective of changing technology) and finally Mystery Train, Images of America in Rock and Roll Music by Greil Marcus. I was dissatisfied with the last book, only because the notes take up half the book and the meat of the thing only covers about five American themes:

• Stagger Lee and the myth of the African American man as gangster
• Everyman and freedom in the songs of Randy Newman
• Pilgrims like The Band
• Rags to riches and the country glamour of Elvis

But the book title does say "images" and not "themes" so my bad there. Anyway, this all got me to thinking about my own bigger list of the Great American Themes. And while I was wide awake last Thursday night it occurred to me most of the big themes are all oddly covered in the 1971 The Partridge Family Album.

Before I launch into these themes and TPF Album, I want to say a few things:

1. This was not my Partridge Family album. This was one of my brother’s albums. This thing came out in 1971 when I was 1 year old. Today both of my brothers refuse to cop to owning this thing but I am a witness to the fact that it was worn out by the time I got to it sometime in 1975. The cover was falling apart and the vinyl was worn and scratched already (and not by my parents, to be sure). Maybe it was neighbor kid Leewee's album (yes, that was his real name and we tend to blame him for things in situations like this).  In any case, this was the first non-Sonny & Cher/Sesame Street/Mr. Rogers/Disney Storyteller album I listened to. 
   
   
2. For years I’ve been confused about why I still like it and looking at the back cover again today on the Googles, I can see why: it was essentially a Wrecking Crew album. The initial Partridge Family “sound” (and I would add, the initial very creepy sound) was based on the Ron Hicklin Singers and The Love Generation. But when everyone learned David Cassidy could sing, he was promoted to singer...for many obvious reasons. The album's non-Cassidy songs reflect the sickly-sweet foundational sound. 
   
   
3. I was too young to be a fan of David Cassidy. He was old hat by the time later-day Gen X girls were crushing on singers and so Sean Cassidy was much preferred as was Kristy McNichol's brother Jimmy, which girls were losing their minds over as I recall. I've also never seen a single episode of The Partridge Family. It wasn't syndicated in St. Louis by the time I was watching copious hours of after-school TV. And these days, I can't look at that patchwork bus for very long before I start to get a headache.

So anyway, back to the themes. I made a table:

Theme	Partridge Family Album Song That Applies	Other Literature That Applies
The great American shoot-out, guns		Any western or gangster film
Reinvention, self-help (Subtopics: failure, alienation, outcasts)	"Brand New Me"	Great Gatsby Light in August
Upward mobility, rags to riches, class (Subtopic: justice)	"Bandela"	To Kill a Mockingbird
The party, altered states, bottoming out	"Point Me in the Direction of Albuquerque" and "I Can Feel Your Heartbeat"	Infinite Jest
Nostalgia, the passage of time, the party’s over, loss of innocence	"Only a Moment Ago"	Blood Meridian
Driving, cars, wheels and rivers	"On the Road"	The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The religious, spiritual quest, cults	"Somebody Wants to Love You"	Moby Dick
Self-actualization, identity (may not necessarily include a reinvention), general Me-ness	"Singing My Song"	Invisible Man
Pragmatism	"I Think I Love You"	Pragmatism by William James, anything by Ben Franklin
Survival of the fittest, The American Dream		The Grapes of Wrath, The Jungle

 

Anyway, the Cher-text does not cover many of these American themes, at least not in song lyrics. Reinvention (and its root-cause of failure) is certainly a career theme, as is alienation, social mobility, and nostalgia (through remediation of old material). The shoot-out cowboy does make an appearance (via Sonny’s songwriting) as does coming-of-age and the loss of innocence (in both Sonny’s cowboy and teen pregnancy songs) and Cher does have a few songs about traveling on airplanes.   

More to think about there.                          

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

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

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

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

Missing pool. Alarmingly missing pool.

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

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

 

 

 

 

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

Glamour shots of one of the bowl thieves.

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where did you think the blood was flowing?

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

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

Cher in Andy Warhol's Interview, December 1974

I'm not proud of it, but when I saw this come up on eBay a few weeks ago, after waiting decades for the issue to show up, I literally threw money at it with the dangerous Make an Offer feature. 

And after reading it I wasn't very sorry I did. I think this is an important interview for 1974, albeit annoyingly gossipy to the point of catty and status obsessed, as Andy Warhol's Interview could often be. (Andy and Bob interviewed her once again for the March 1982 issue)

In 1974, Cher, David Geffen (who Cher was dating at the time), Andy Warhol, Bob Colacello and Andrea Portago all met at the Hotel Pierre and they all mostly talk about shopping.

Every column or so of text had a list of shorthand topics that were discussed but not transcribed. An example:

"Liza Minelli
the wedding
Jack Haley
coming to town this weekend
Halston's giving a party"

Another especially egregious example is this one:

"serious economic situation
very depressing
stuff by the yard
1940s jewelry
so cheap now
vulgar, but big
Cartier's in Paris
the best
pull out their old stuff. Ask them.
Erte's book
designers today
any master craftsmen?"

However, there are some unique conversational events in this interview.

1. Defending Sonny:
   
   (a) Cher has just found out earlier in the year that Sonny had slyly screwed her out of all her earnings over the previous decade. She has just discovered she was a paid employee in a company Sonny and his lawyer created called Cher Enterprises and Cher was entitled to none of the profits but three weeks of paid vacation (so that's something...but which she never received, telling the Warhol gang the act Sonny & Cher never took a vacation in all of the last 12 years). Sonny's contract also stipulated Cher could not work on any solo projects without his permission. So Cher had been out of work for most of 1974 while David Geffen used his formidable gray cells to liberate Cher from Sonny's contractual clutches. Geffen as Cher's knight-in-shining-armor was not appreciated by Sonny, who despised David Geffen for years afterwards with the heat of a thousand suns.
   
   Despite this drama, Cher refuses to trash talk Sonny in this interview. "I knew that we owned half of the show and I thought that Cher Enterprises was just a company you had to have because people are always forming companies--I really didn't even know why, you know. I just thought because we had a payroll, and the checks said Cher Enterprises...Now I get nothing....the judge gave me a certain amount of money each month to live on until I can have half of whatever it is..." (this never happened by the way; Cher ended up having to buy out her contract from Sonny which took her until 1977). When Andrea talks about how greedy that was of Sonny, Cher's response is "Well, it's a strange thing....Sonny was really angry. He said, 'You screwed up everything. I could have made all this money and...it's your fault so I should be the one who keeps the money and you should go out and work." I said, "That seems logical, but when I met you, you were a truck driver and I was doing nothing and we were nothing and now we have all this money and all these things, and you should take half and I should take half..."
   
   The next question is Andy Warhol asking Cher if she does her own nails.
   
   (b) Custody of Chastity: Sonny also fought Cher for full custody of Chastity "and then the judge ended up giving him less time to see her than I had always given him so he said, 'Well, I hope you're not going to stick to that' and I said, "No, you can see her whenever you feel like seeing her.' My goal in life is not to keep her from him."
   
   (c) Sonny's flopped variety TV show: Andrea asks Cher if she saw Sonny's 1974 show, The Sonny Comedy Review. Cher says, "Yeah, I did." "Did you like it?" Andrea asks. For the record, this show was handed it's ass in  1974 but Cher says, "Well, there were a lot of things about it that I liked. You know?" Andrea says, "I thought you were sorely missing and Chastity, too." Cher says "Well, a lot of people think that, but I think that if you looked at the show and you didn't remember the Sonny and Cher show, that it was a pretty good show." Andrea retorts, "But it was the same format. How could you not remember it?" And Cher says, "It was, that's true. Well, that's the producer's fault because they just kind of do the same thing over and over again and they've done it like five times but the only time that it actually ever worked was with us but I don't think they know how to do anything else."
   
   So kids...this was the apex of Sonny's assholery toward Cher (going for her share of a fortune and full custody of their child). So when in 1998 people ragged on Cher at Sonny's death for jumping on a grieving-widow-wagon because she had spent decades trashing him, this was just more of the same anti-Cher bullshit made up over nothing true. For all Cher's softball insults about Sonny over the years ("I traded one ugly man for another"), she defended him just as often and always came to his aid when summoned, like when he opened his LA restaurant and needed publicity, when he was running for mayor of Palm Springs and needed publicity which precipitated the David Letterman Show reunion. This interview is the sterling example of how hard, if not impossible, it really was to turn Cher against Sonny. Not even Sonny could do it.
   
   

   Sonny & Cher outside of the Santa Monica Courthouse in 1974 where Sonny slipped Cher some tongue for the paparazzi:

   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. Being a Slave to Fashion, Andy Warhol vs. Cher:
   
   They're discussing people who wear whatever they see in Vogue Magazine. Cher defends people who need help figuring out complete looks with magazines. Andy Warhol then says, "And the fashion editors spend millions finding the right things, and they are right about what looks good; whatever they show is really right-looking, and they do work hard at it so people might as well take advantage of it."[Andy Warhol: Fashion Apologist!] Cher then says, "there will always be people who won't follow this. Sometimes I buy a 3-piece suit but then I just wear the pants because it makes me feel strange to go out in something that's pre-set already for me. I kind of like to screw around with it...I think there's really no such thing as what's 'right' in fashion now and I think that's good."
   
   Another thing Cher gets no credit for: her risk taking 'looks' that say fuck-you to fashion more often than catering to it. Some 1974 Cher looks:
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. Laverne vs. Ernestine:
   
   This is short but interesting, Cher's conception of her character. When Andrea says Cher's Laverne character "is a little bit reminiscent of Lily Tomlin's telephone operator," Ernestine. Cher says, "I guess they were both strange kind of ladies, but then Ernestine was so square and Laverne was so broad...she played around a lot."
   
   Laverne and Ernestine never met in TVLand like Laverne and Geraldine did.
   
   There's still time.
   
   
4. Meeting famous people:
   
   It's always interesting to hear famous people talk about meeting other people they consider more famous than themselves. David Geffen says, "your fantasies are bound to be destroyed upon meeting almost anybody. I'm sure if we met Clark Gable we'd be very disappointed" and Cher says, "Yeah, because we all have an idea of what we think of Clark Gable, right? and we'd make him fit the mold of filling our insecurities, our neuroses or what we need of him as our star..." and then Andy Warhol says they just met Joan Crawford and she was great, "fit the bill" he says. Cher doesn't seem to buy it and tries to quote something about legends and men and David Geffen remembers the quote more accurately, "When the Legend is bigger than the Man, then print the Legend."
   
   

   Cher's celebrity obsession was Audrey Hepburn, by the way, and I don't think she was disappointed. Speaking of which, this picture I just found on Pinterest is captioned, "Audrey with Cher Hair."

   
5. The Famous and the Famous:
   
   Cher's recent Aspen trip proving celebrities sometimes really do hang out together: Cher is talking about having dinner plans that night with Ara Gallant and how Cher had just been to Aspen with Ara and "Angelica, Brit Ekland, Apollonia, Ingrid, myself....And David, Lou, and Jack. We had the most wonderful time. We had a ball. I mean we just blew it out. Skied all day and danced al night."
   
   As you would expect. Then Bob tries to talk Cher into going shopping that Saturday for 1940s jewelry. (We gotta get in on this hanging out with Cher thing.)
   
   
6. Cher in Movies: 
   
   Andy Warhol tells her her movie was "so great. It was really good comedy." And Cher says, "What? Good Times?" She then acknowledges both Good Times and Chastity as being "much longer ago...let's see, I was 20, so that's eight years ago." (Ages!)
   
   

Andy, Bob and Andrea leave the Pierre and talk about how good Cher looked without makeup and how "she'd be fun to shop with--she loves all the jewelry." 

Cher's Performance in Jimmy Dean Gets a Deep Dive

When people ask me what my favorite Cher performance is I always say Sissy in Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. Her performances as Loretta in Moonstruck and Rusty in Mask are pretty great too, but just not as great.

The issue in saying this, however, is that Jimmy Dean is a much more difficult movie for people to watch than all the other Cher movies. Unless you're a fan of Robert Altman and even then, this is not a favorite film among even Altman fans.

For one thing, there's the convention of time-travel through the dime-store mirror that seems confusing for most people. Then there's the whole storyline of transgenering, which in 1982 was challenging for viewers and is still controversial for some people now. 

So I was thrilled to find this dissection of Cher's performance by film critic Claudio Alves who has been watching the Criterion Channels Films of Endearment series. He calls this move "an underrated Robert Altman effort" and rightly credits Altman's role in handing Cher a serious film career. "If not for this flick, her ascendance to movie stardom might have never happened." 

Alves concedes that of the three women, Cher's role is "the least showy part, though no less complex" compared to Karen Black's performance of a trans woman ("portrayed with a sensitivity that feels ahead of its time for 1982"), and Sandy Dennis' performance of "warped fandom" and a life of lies. Cher's role still contains plenty of "juicy monologues and shattered multidimensionality."

He breaks apart Cher's casual entrance and connects it to her on-stage persona. He talks about her "vocal cadence and the rhythm of gestures" that reveal "a deeper weariness" and he contrasts this to her portrayal of her younger, more jubilant self.

He takes apart her "humor and energy" in the role during periods of reaction to the dramas of other characters ("comedic frustration," "dipsomatic deadpan," "bored and slightly critical in that way one is when being presented with an oft-repeated lie") and her performance of

"exaggerating emotion in order to force herself into genuine feeling. It's a risky gambit on Cher's part, for the approach could read as over-deliberate, mayhap over-technical when compared to Dennis' externalized implosions and Black's sense of innate fragmentation. Thankfully, Cher thrives in making bold choices look instinctual, erasing any signs of forcefulness until everything she does on-screen looks effortless. Such powers aren't beneficial for winning awards, though, since so much value is put on the performer's self-conscious extenuations. Nevertheless, they're vital to the songstress' success as a dramatic actress. They also define her presence as that of an old-school movie star. She can walk into a movie, captivate the camera, and magnetize the audience's gaze without breaking a sweat."

Alves even has some rare praise for Altman's work here: "This film...works as a showcase for Altman's ability to collaborate with actors and shoot limited spaces, finding infinite strategies to capture and contrast the store and its women...using these famous performers in ways no other film ever tried, before or since.

Not only does Alves give Cher's performance due diligence, his screenshots are perfectly illustrative of key moments.

Read the piece here: http://thefilmexperience.net/blog/2022/5/3/almost-there-cher-in-come-back-to-the-5-dime-jimmy-dean-jimm.html

The She-Shed Cher Shrine

One thing I finished in April was the ‘shrine’ in the Cher She-Shed. Full disclosure, the story of the she-shed Cher shrine is a long and winding one. It began, one way or another, all the way back in 1998-9 when my friend Julie cajoled me onto the Internet and I discovered early Cher fan websites in the mid-1990s that mostly contained only copious amounts of pictures of Cher.

At the time I called those sites disparagingly 'Cher shrines.' After learning HTML for Ape Culture (Julie again), I secretly wanted to create my own Cher website but wanted to avoid a shrine. I came up with the jokey 'Cher Scholar' to pretend scholarly legitimacy. I’ve since come to learn you should be careful what you joke about. Jokes can overtake you. Sure enough, in 2010 I found a copy of the journal Camera Obscura with an academic essay on Lena Horne and I've been aspirationally scholarin’ since.

Around the same time I had moved to New Mexico which is composed of three large groups of people: Native American Indians, Hispanics (self-identified descendents from Spain vs Latin Americans) and Anglos. When I moved here I started  researching the major Anglo artists here, including the Taos and Santa Fe art colonies and the grand dame of Anglo art here Georgia O’Keeffe. O’Keeffe is important in New Mexico for two reasons. (I promise this will get back to Cher). First of all, she’s one of the very few female artists with a museum dedicated to her (thanks to heiress Anne Marion). She’s also a pretty good interpreter of New Mexico from the point of view of Anglo transplants. And there has been a proliferation of Santa Fe artists and writers that are descendants of her style (and lifestyle).

Back in the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s my grandparents accumulated a bit of American Indian art from my grandfather's career in the Indian Service. I had a somewhat advanced knowledge of traditional Pueblo arts in New Mexico and Hopi, Arizona. Meeting students and teachers while working at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and visiting their associated Contemporary Museum (the area’s most interesting modern art actually), I caught up on non-traditional artists. But knew little to nothing about the Hispanic arts in the area

Back in 2015, I started working at a community college in Albuquerque and I took a class on New Mexico Art History. It was the whole world of Spanish-influenced New Mexican arts that had an impact on the Cher shrine as it came to be.

New Mexico was a very remote area in the empire of Spain for about three centuries. As a comparison, New Mexico has only been part of the United States for less than 200 years. Some very unique arts and culture developed here due to area's remoteness (from Spain and even Mexico), particularly objects related to the Spanish/New Mexican Catholic Church, as well as the practice of speaking Spanish here that was so secluded, it 'stagnated' (or separated from the natural language evolutions happening in Mexico and Spain) and became a different dialect of Spanish that is spoken to this day in Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado.

Most of these arts were developed from lack of materials like gold, silver, wool and plaster. This includes fiber arts like colcha (lack of yarn), tinwork (lack of silver), straw filigree pieces made with wheat (lack of gold), and wooden altars they call retablos (lack of painting canvases) and bultos (or santeros), wooden saint statues (lack of plaster).

Anglo painters like Marsden Hartley even painted the retablos and bultos.

There are pre-historic and multi-cultural arts here that exist nowhere else on earth.

And here is where we come back to Cher. 

The idea to start a fake-shrine began when I acquired the praying-hands Cher blanket (at the Chersonian, we call it a “tapestry”) which was originally sold on her Believe tour. I thought immediately I could hang this up with a two-person pew beneath it. Fans could then pray "with" Cher if (hopefully not) "to" Cher. 

Then I found a little tourist retablo of Saint Cecelia in Santa Fe that looks totally like Cher in the 1970s. Catholic candles are very popular here (you can find them at every grocery store) and there are now Cher versions proliferating on Etsy. I snared one for the decades 1960s, 70s and 2000s. I then collected a few tin nichos (little nooks) in need of pictures so I downloaded some  Cher pics in prayer gestures and a very creepy Cher head transposed onto Jesus.

(click any pic to enlarge)

At Spanish Market I ran into the booth of an artist who calls himself the “Picasso Santero,” Jose A. Lucero. His Jesus retablos had an uncanny resemblance not only to Cher in various colored wigs but they even uncannily indicated a Picasso-like post-plastic-surgery Cher. How great is that??

The Cher store at Caesars Palace put out Cher mints that serve a handy Eucharist. And then I found the handy fan-made kneeling pillow (to replace the pew, which there was no room for).

You may recognize the Vida scarf Cher designed a few years ago underneath everything.

One day I found a fan-made picture of the Divas Last Supper on Etsy. It arrived in the mail with a Britney Spears laminated card. I had no idea what this card was and asked Mr. Cher Scholar who informed me it was a Catholic prayer card. It took me literally a second to decide to design a Cher one with her lyrics for “Chastity Sun” serving as the prayer on the back. 

All that was missing were the bultos, the wooding carvings of the saints. 

I couldn’t very well ask religious artists at Spanish Market to make me a custom Cher bulto, although I’ve stood in front of many a vendor table contemplating it. “This Jesus is so cool but…”

For Christmas last year my friend Julie got me a little wooden doll of Cher carved with her "Take Me Home" outfit. She found a Palo Alto artist named Holly on Etsy who does various wooden pop culture figures and she has a whole suite of Cher dolls in iconic outfits. I suddenly realized these was technically tiny bulto figures.

And so the New Mexican She-Shed Cher Shrine was done.

It’s been a big unnerving to watch some of my more religious family members tour the Cher she-shed but I did find the "Sonny & Cher read the Bible" advertisement; so I hope that mitigates the sacreligiousness for them somewhat. The religious visitors don’t seem too disturbed, honestly.

It’s the straight men who experience adverse effects repeatedly. I’ve taken large family groups into the shed and the girls (gay or straight) all express surprise and delight (which is always a shock to me considering how dorkey the whole enterprise is). But after the initial pass-through, I will invariably look around and all the straight men will have disappeared.

I look out the door and they’re out on the lawn literally fanning themselves. I’m not kidding. I think they’re having a religious moment.

 

More information about New Mexico's Spanish arts and culture:

Starting on the Cher Show

So back in March I promised to start reviewing Cher's solo show after April work ended. So here we go. The first episode has been posted along with some context.

Other fans mentioned last year that, disappointingly, the Timelife episodes were cut, in this episode's case even more heavily than those that appeared on VH1 back in the mid-1990s. So that's kind of a drag. Since the songs cut from the first episode were jazz and Broadway standards, it's hard to blame the high cost of pop songs.

Episode two coming up soon.

 

And Then The Thing Was Done: The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour

Whew. The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour review is done: https://www.cherscholar.com/the-tv-variety-shows-and-specials.html.

Huge milestone!

I looked at my publication date for episode 1 and it was all the way back to January 25, 2019!! And here I thought I’d finish the whole series in a little over one year. (There are 52 weeks in a year, right? 67 episodes. No problem.) It took me 3 years and 2 months.

I remember starting the project sitting at my old desk at the Central New Mexico Community College job, happy as a clam. Shortly afterwards, I was unfortunately promoted to a job I did not want and went back to ICANN, COVID happened and now possible nuclear antihalation is on the horizon. But hey, at least we’re halfway done with this project! Smiley face.

The 67 Comedy Hour shows are done. We have 63  shows to go (29 Cher shows and 34 Sonny & Cher Show part deux, plus a handful of TV specials). I’m going to take a little break for NaPoWriMo 2022 but then I’ll be back to review the Cher shows, some of which I’ve still never seen, even though they come out on the Time-Life series two years ago. I was waiting to review them here right after watching them. So looking forward to that.

Last night I actually had a dream about the last episode I just posted, #67. I dreamed I was going to write about how this was a typical “clips” show, or “greatest hits” type show we’re so used to seeing now, the retrospective. And I had always read that this was a cobbled-together finale of clips.

But I dreamed a young producer met up with me to set me straight. Btw, none of the show’s producers are young anymore; some are not even alive. And he told me this the last show was assembled from never-before-seen clips that were cut from earlier episodes and thus, new to us. But in any case, not rerun clips.

I thought ‘how novel” and I looked forward to reviewing the episode today to see if this was, in fact, true.

It was!

Famous Mononyms and Questions to Cher Scholar

JPC

So while I was in Cleveland, we heard that the hip new song the kids are listening to, if by kids we mean my 5-years older-than-me sister-in-law (who is a trends-watcher nonetheless), is "ABCDEFU" by the artist Gayle. Looking her up online, Gayle is described in an article as a one-named artist "like Cher." 

Which makes me crazy right now because Cher hasn't been the only one-named artist since "like Madonna" or before that "like Charo."

And since "like Adele," it's become absurd to keep saying "like Cher."

But this reminds us that when Cher legally became a mononym in the late 1970s, people lost their minds over it (or rolled their eyes a lot). This is what brought to being Cher's nickname, "Just Plain Cher" or "JPC."

There are so many single-named artists now there are web pages listing them: http://www.namenerds.com/uucn/listofweek/onename.html 

So many in fact, someone has taken the time to rank the mononymed singers: https://www.ranker.com/list/best-mononymous-singers-and-musicians/music-lover

TV Tributes

Betty White recently passed away short of her 100th birthday, which made everyone sad. Cher took part in the televised tribute, even singing the theme song for the tribute and talking about what a good friend Betty was:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5rfZ4olWyw

 

Last year, Cher also contributed to the Tina Turner tribute when Turner was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwUxoSLLtUk (Cher parts start at 6:30 and 10:45)

 

 

 

Questions to Cher Scholar

Speaking of Tina Turner, I recently compiled a list of Cher's appearances with Tina for a friend. 

Shame, Shame, Shame (Cher show, 1975-6) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCncupnwYDQ

 

Resurrection Shuffle (Cher show, 1975-6) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHq11PKfws0

 

Beatles Medley (Cher show, 1975-6) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y62c6Cs07S4

 

 

Country Side of Life (Cher show, 1975-6) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8iXSUMeZGE

 

Makin Music Is My Business (The Sonny & Cher Show, 1977-8) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK8SnJKiwhU

 

Divas Live (1999): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwE8oOuAjzI

 

Oprah: (bad version) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_n33Tsdnj4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPwgIO1LhqU&list=PLeKeuge7TXP_Sl1JLeFsYO5UMDFt0fGLL

On Entertainment Tonight Cher talks about Tina as a role model for her: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RadomvThxns

 

Cher and Tina Turner know each other going back to the 1960s when Sonny & Cher allegedly did caravan-of-stars style / soul revue tours when they were starting out, performing alongside big headliners Ike and Tina.

A Cher fan recently wrote to me asking for all the songwriting Cher credits. I compiled this list of wikipedia links for him:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Breed_(album) - 1973 The "Chastity Sun" lyric rewrite of Seals & Crofts' "Ruby Jean and Billie Lee"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxes_(soundtrack) - 1979 "Bad Love"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_Me_Home_(Cher_album) - 1979 "My Song (Too Far Gone)" about her divorce from Gregg Allman.

https://www.lesdudek.com/Gypsy-Ride.html - 1981 "Don't Trust That Woman" with Cher's lyrics and Les Dudek's music

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leather_Jackets_(album) - 1986 "Don't Trust That Woman" with Cher's lyrics and Elton John's music

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not.com.mercial 1994 (writing) full album except for ""Born with the Hunger" (Sally Eikhard) and "Classified 1A" (Sonny Bono), released 2000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Man%27s_World_(Cher_album) 1995 "One by One" (thanks to Cher scholar Steven for pointing this one out)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Believe_(Cher_album) 1998 "Believe"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Proof_(Cher_album)  2001 "The Music's No Good Without You" and "Real Love"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closer_to_the_Truth 2013 "Take it Like a Man," "Dressed to Kill," and "Lovers Forever"

 

Cher Decades Smell Testings

So last year Cher released a fun new product in her new perfume line, four different perfumes called Decades (based on the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s). I was very excited to see what this was all about. Unfortunately, I was too excited because the night I received my spray-bottle versions I opened and snorted them immediately without trying a blind test them myself. Which I immediately regretted. 

So now whoever comes into the house is subjected to a Cher perfume smell test. For the most part, the test smellers have failed miserably and there seems to be no rhyme or reason who does better or worse (age, schnoz, recall ability). Seems it's hard to guess a decade by its scent although it doesn't seem an illogical task; decades do have particular smells: incense we associate with the 60s, that Windsong perfume I religiously purchased every year for my mother's birthday in the 70s, Calvin Klein in the 80s and, of course, teen spirit in the 90s.

That scents are so hard to ID is not surprising to me, though. There was a Children's Museum in St. Louis called The Magic House that my friends and I used to visit long after we were children (it was that fun) and The Magic House had an exhibit of boxes on a table with steel lids. You'd open each lid one by one and there'd be a powerful smell you were supposed to identify. The smells would be so familiar but impossibly illusive...like banana. 

The Results:

Mr. Cher Scholar (3 years older than me) initially ID'd all the smells correctly and then second-guessed himself and changed two of his answers. He said distinct memories came up from his childhood for each smell. The 60s scent had a floral smell he associated with that decade, the 70s scent reminded him of his mother's Jean Nate; and the 80s smelled like a date.

I gave the rollerballs out as a gift for Christmas. Dave (same age as me) guessed them all correctly. He couldn't articulate why. My friend Julie (younger but 80s era) got them all wrong. After knowing the correct smells, she did associate her mom's perfume to the 80s scent.

I threw two small Christmas parties this year (due to Covid). The first party was for my local cousins (both 60s kids). The party was a bit of disaster as the family was fully lactose intolerant and the menu was unintentionally dairy-laced. My cousins Mark and David both failed miserably. I blame the dairy.

The second party was for local friends all of whom were 90s kids. (I made sure to gather dietary requirements this time.) My friend Mary ID'd the patchouli in the 60s bottle right away. But got the others wrong and then proceeded to fold her answer sheet into an origami swan. Her husband Peter got the 60s/70s right but not the 80s/90s. He said he could tell they went from strong to subtle decade by decade. Melo got them all right but she cheated and guessed by the color wheel. Kalisha got the 70s/90s right but not the 80s/60s.

Last week, I just took a trip to Cleveland to try the rollerballs out on family members. My sister-in-law (five years older) got one right (80s), my brother (5 years older) got them all wrong, but did keep the 60s/70s together (which he said were more pungent) and the 80s/90s which he said smelled more contemporary, sweet, warm and leathery. My mother (1940s generation) made all the same guesses my brother did. My Dad (same generation) got only the 70s scent right.

You can get the rollerballs separately or in a set. 

Soon, according to Cher's Instagram, we will be able to buy the fancy bottles in all the decades too.  

New Cher Channel Videos

I'll be visiting my parents and brother's family in Cleveland next week. When I get back, I'll have a lot more smell-test results on the Cher Decades perfumes and will be posting those when I get back. In the meantime...

Main Man

Cher recently posted the official video for her 1988 single, the Desmond Child song "Main Man." Cher performed this on the MTV Video Music Awards that year but the song failed to chart. The home-video feel of it was due to being shot at her Benedict Canyon Egyptian compound (soon to be sold to Eddie Murphy).

The hair is less big and the outfits less blingy and coincidentally this song will make an appearance in my 2022 NaPoWriMo project this April.

As in all the other videos of this era, Robert Camilletti makes an appearance; but instead of the fictional-music-video role he normally played, this video seems to be saying this is a glimpse into their much quieter real life together.

Elijah also makes a brief appearance in footage from the aforementioned Video Music Awards performance.

This has always been one of my favorite songs from Cher's Geffen Record/Power-Ballad era.

Looking for Love/When Will I Be Loved

Cher also released two more Celebration at Caesars clips, Johnny Lee's "Looking for Love," from the very popular 1980 movie Urban Cowboy, combined in a medley with Linda Rondstadt's "When Will I Be Loved," a song Cher sings from atop a mechanical bull.

These performances are illustrative of what I think is so special about this show. Since I was about 11 or 12, I've seen this concert many, many, many times and I believe it's a key show in her live-show timeline. Many fans had mostly only seen Cher on television up to the early 1980s, variety show episodes and some experimental TV specials up to this point. Not all fans had had the opportunity to see Cher perform live on the road or in one of her Las Vegas shows. So this was a different kind of TV special, a sustained concert. And Cher was turning a new leaf as a musical performer. The seeds of this show grew out of her Take Me Home tour which was her first tour without Sonny. Her demeanor is remarkably different from the torch singer on the 1970s TV shows.

She is confident, makes eye contact with the audience and the camera, her body language is full of bravado and she moves with a kind of ease that will make an impression on all the fans watching her. It's the ingredient of swagger everyone will take for granted by the end of the 1980s.

 

 

 

These performances are very sexual. Cher is looking awesome in a cowboy hat and sporting her own turquoise jewelry.  (And dancing with her at one point is Damita Jo Freeman, who allegedly taught Michael Jackson how to moonwalk, see pic at right). Cher's interaction with the male dancers is very physical. Cher lightly teases the hip-gyrating dancing cowboys and there's plenty of affectionate touching.

In "When Will I Be Loved," she romps with sometimes two cowboys. And there's an interlude on the mechanical bull with one of those cowboys which is very, very suggestive, their rhythmic movements indicating sex and exclamations of ecstasy, all providing some ironic distance from the lyrics of the song, ostensibly lamenting Cher's sad love experiences (lied to, put down, pushed 'round). It's a real "woe-is-me, wink-wink" performance.

 

Look at all those cowboys!