Cher

            On Wednesday morning I continued gathering images for my photo-video of “Les millionaires” by Serge Gainsbourg. I have 219 so far. I probably won’t need more than 250. 

            I weighed 87.45 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning since December 24. 

            I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio during song practice and it stayed in tune the whole time. Tomorrow I’ll play my Kramer. 

            Around midday, with a small brush, I finished painting with “blue bliss” the edges of the casing of the bathroom door frame. 

            I weighed 88.8 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back and had to stop to pee at the College and Yonge McDonald’s. My hands were warm in my winter gloves until after I took them off in the cold to lock and unlock my bike. If I put cold hands inside the gloves they tend to stay somewhat cold. 

            I weighed 87.95 kilos at 18:35. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 20:12. 

            I tried again to digitize the cassette tape that has come through distorted for the last two weeks I’ve tried. Unclicking “Allow other applications to take control of this device” didn’t help and this time the Audacity timeline was moving incredibly slow. I restarted the computer and shut down Bit Torrent just in case it was using up too much memory. I restarted my Scarlett 2i2 audio interface and started getting a waveform in Audacity. The timeline started moving at normal speed but the result was still mostly noise. The left track of the tape plays a faint other recording perhaps from the other side or underneath the track I’m trying to record. In the Audacity recording that’s the only part that comes through. In Audio Setup for “Host” I switched from MME to Windows Direct Sound. I’ll see if that works tomorrow. If it doesn’t I’ll try Windows WASAPI. 

            I had a tomato, cucumber and avocado salad while watching season 1, episode 8 of The Carol Burnett Show. 

            During the audience warm-up, guest Nanette Fabray comes out and says the outfit Cher is wearing tonight makes her look like an old frump by comparison. An audience member asks Carol to do her Tarzan yell and she does. Someone asks Carol how she likes being a sex symbol and it makes her feel good. 

            In the first skit a TV announcer interviews Carol as a member of a nudists camp. She says she has nothing to hide. 

            The second skit is an office scene with Carol as the secretary who is given all the work and Nanette is the flirty one who the boss keeps around though she barely knows how to sharpen a pencil. The boss has Nanette bring her pad into his office where Carol knows she is doing more than taking dictation. The boss’s wife comes in and Carol happily lets her into the boss’s office. The result is Nanette being led out by her ear and the boss being beaten up. He calls Carol into his office so she puts on her lipstick and takes off her glasses but without them she can’t see so on her way she falls out the window. 

            In the next skit Carol and Nanette are wearing the same clothes and are out of work, sitting on a park bench. They had shown so much animosity towards each other before but now they agree to try to be buddies. They sing “Bosom Buddies” by Jerry Herman from the musical Mame. 

            The next skit is very short. Carol is a housewife serving her husband Harvey Korman coffee but he says it’s dishwater and smashes the cup. The next night she tries again and this time he dies because she poisons the coffee. 

            The next guest is Cher, looking incredibly gorgeous and dressed all in red, singing her hit song “You Better Sit Down Kids” by Sonny Bono. Then Sonny comes out and they sing together his song “Living For You”. Then Carol comes out to ask them if they’ll record a song she and Harvey wrote and they do a deliberately bad impression of Sonny and Cher who walk away. 

            The next skit is a parody of several foreign airlines, starting with France. Nanette plays a sexy French flight attendant who gets everybody making love while she sings the English version of “La vie en rose” with melody by Louisguy and lyrics by Mack David. 

            Next is a Japanese airline with Nanette and Carol as geisha flight attendants but doing what would be considered a racist version of the Japanese accent with the switching of all the “L”s for “”R”s. The pilot is an experienced kamikaze pilot. 

            Then they do a Slavic airline with Carol as a slob flight attendant with unkempt and dirty clothing and hair. Everything she touches breaks. The pilot is in a T-shirt and torn pants. He says it will take them a week to get to Warsaw but who wants to go to Poland anyway. 

            Finally there is an old style song and dance number featuring Carol, Nanette, Sonny, Cher, Harvey, and Lyle. I assume it’s a song that appeared in a musical but no searches turn it up. It starts with “Whatever happened to that old time rhythm? Where did it go?” 

            Cher took acting lessons as a child. She had difficulties in school because of dyslexia so she quit at 16. She took acting lessons and supported herself by dancing in clubs on the Sunset Strip. She had a brief love affair with Warren Beatty at that time. 

            Then still 16 she met the 27 year old Sonny Bono who gave her a job as his housekeeper. He was working for Phil Spector and talked him into hiring Cher as a session singer. She sang backup on “You’ve Lost That Lovin Feeling” and “Be My Baby”. 

            She married Sonny when she was 18. At first he wrote songs for her to sing solo but they didn’t chart. Her first record was “Ringo I Love You”. Sonny had the idea that they would become a duo and after the release of their first album Look at Us, they became stars. Unlike most male-female duos Sonny sang the high harmony while Cher sang low. 

            In 1965 The Rolling Stones advised them to go to England because North Americans didn’t get them. The advice was right because literally overnight London went crazy over the Sonny and Cher’s style of dress. When England was nuts about Sonny and Cher so became the US and the rest of the world. 

            They made their film debut together in Wild on the Beach. Women began imitating Cher, straightening their hair and dying it black. 

            In 1966 Cher put out a solo album and had a hit with “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down). Between 1965 and 1972 they had six top 10 songs including “Baby Don’t Go”, “I Got You Babe”, and “The Beat Goes On”. They starred in the movie Good Times in 1967. Cher wanted a heavier sound like Cream and Led Zeppelin but Sonny refused. Her album 3614 Jackson Highway explored R&B and Soul but Sonny didn’t like it. 

            She starred in Chastity. 

            By the end of the 60s their hits dried up but their live show was still popular. Their famous onstage rapport developed out of actually arguing on stage. When they saw how much audiences liked it they began insulting each other as part of the act. Sonny started maneuvering them towards getting a TV show and encouraged network executives to check out their live show. In 1971 they landed The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour. The show was a hit and it revitalized Cher’s recording career. The Bob Mackie clothes she wore set 70s fashion trends. She had three #1 hits with “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves”, “Dark Lady” and “Half Breed”. 

            They separated in 1974 and that killed the show because people wanted to see them together. They each tried their own solo shows but they didn’t take. Cher’s show however lasted two seasons and was critically acclaimed. Sonny and Cher reunited with a new Sonny and Cher Show but it only lasted one season. 

            In 1976 Mego toys released a Cher doll that outsold Barbie. 

            From 1978 to 1980 she lived with Gene Simmons of Kiss. 

            In 1979 she released a disco album called Take Me Home and it was a hit. 

            In 1980 she formed a rock band called Black Rose and gave herself a short haired punk look. At the same time she had a residency in Las Vegas and was making $300,000 a week. In 1981 she did a successful duet with Meat Loaf called “Dead Ringer for Love”. 

            Cher turned to acting and made her Broadway debut in 1982 with Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean. She reprised her role in the film adaptation. She co-starred in Silkwood (for which she was nominated for an Oscar), The Witches of Eastwick, and If These Walls Could Talk (her directorial debut). She starred in Mask (for which she won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress), Suspect, Moonstruck (for which she won an Academy Award), Burlesque, Mermaids, Tea With Mussolini, and Faithful. 

            In 1987 she released a critically acclaimed audiobook with her reading The Ugly Duckling. The same year she released the fragrance Uninhibited which made $15 million in its first year. 

            She also kept singing and had hits with “If I Could Turn Back Time”, “After All”, “Believe” (which featured the first use of Auto Tune), “I Found Someone”, “Love and Understanding”, “Strong Enough”, and “You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me”. She won a Grammy for “Believe” and an Emmy for her televised farewell concert tour. She covered “Fernando” by Abba and Bjorn Ulvaeus of Abba declared that it’s her song now. 

            She released two fitness videos in the early 90s. Around that time she contracted the Epstein-Barr virus and couldn’t sing for a while. She made $10,000 doing health related infomercials. 

            She published a book of autobiographical essays called First Time. 

            In 2000 she released a controversial album of her own songs called Not Commercial that was condemned by the Catholic Church. 

            Cher: The Memoir was on the New York Times Bestseller list for three weeks. 

            After Margaret Thatcher died there was the hashtag #nowthatchersdead but many thought it meant “Now that Cher’s dead”. 

            She’s had several plastic surgery procedures. There are four Barbie dolls in her likeness. 

            She said, “Some women get all excited about nothing and then marry him”. 

            She is called The Goddess of Pop. 

            She’s the only Academy Award winning actor to also have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.