Okay listen Cher is one of my favorite people in the world and it honestly makes me mad she doesn’t get much love these days
So Cher is born in the 1940s. Her dad is an Armenian refugee who develops gambling and alcohol problems. He and her mom divorce--again, keep in mind this is 1946--when Cher is ten months old. Cher will only meet him once again in her life.
Her mom remarries and has another baby. It is worth noting that this makes Cher the metaphorical redheaded stepchild--her younger sister is white, while Cher is Middle Eastern. In her autobiography she talks about being detained at the Mexican border as a child because the US border control was convinced her parents were trying to smuggle a Mexican child back into the US, thanks to her dark skin. This is when Cher starts wishing she looked like her blonde-haired, blue-eyed sister, and she literally carries that baggage all the way through the 2000s, when her promo for the Living Proof album is almost entirely based on her having blonde hair.
At some point in this period, Cher jumps off a swingset, lands on the edge of a metal coffee can, and snaps all the tendons in her foot. The medicine of the day lets them mostly put her foot back together, but her mother is told she may never walk again.If you’ve ever seen Mamma Mia!, you know the doctors were wrong.
Cher produces her first single in 1964 under the name Bonnie Jo Mason. She was forced to change her name by producers because they felt her birth name, Cherilyn La Piere, wasn’t American enough. The single bombs.
She releases “I Got You, Babe” with Sonny Bono in 1965, as “Sonny and Cher.” It goes to #1.
Cher has the first of her two kids, a then-presumed-to-be-daughter with Sonny who we now know as Chaz Bono. She releases a ton of music, including a wildly controversial song called “You Better Sit Down, Kids,” which is sung from the perspective of a father trying to explain his divorce to his kids. This was 1967, so that’s like . . . you didn’t get divorced back then. You just didn’t. And the fact that the song doesn’t give any of the then-at-least-marginally-accepted reasons for divorce--like infidelity--doesn’t make it any better. (All it says is “your mother and I, kids/don’t see eye to eye.”) But it makes #1 because Cher is just . . . like that, and manages to turn just about everything to gold.
She and Sonny host a variety show. At this point they divorce, and Cher goes solo. She doesn’t yet change her name legally, but does begin going by “just Cher.”
ONLY THEN DOES CHER DISCOVER SHE HAS DYSLEXIA.
She takes Chaz in for school testing because he’s struggling and she’s struggling to help him, and after mentioning her frustrations the proctor gives her a test for dyslexia, right on the spot.
She gets married, has a child, and becomes an international superstar in both music and television before finding out she's dyxlexic.
She goes on to lose her last name entirely, perform on Broadway in a Tony-award-winning show (Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean), becomes an Emmy-winning director (for a 1994 documentary on abortion, “If These Walls Could Talk”), an Oscar-winning movie star (for an incredible biopic you should watch, called Silkwood), a gay icon, a triple-platinum recording artist, and did I mention we’re still in the 1990s?
. . . and then she becomes one of the first musical stars with her own website. Yes, cher.com is over 20 years old, and one of the first things she did with it was release an album she self-produced called Not.Com.Mercial, featuring all the songs her producers told her over the years she couldn’t release. I strongly recommend you look up “Our Lady of San Francisco” on YouTube. If you think you know Cher, you need to listen to Not.Com.Mercial, because you really, really don’t.
. . . . and only then does she go on to perform in Burlesque and Mamma Mia, with “You Haven’t Seen The Last Of Me” in 2011 making her the only solo artist in American history to have at least one number-one single in every single decade for six straight decades. To the best of my knowledge, she’s also the only performer ever who can say they have won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Golden Globe, and Tony Award.
And she did it all as a physically and mentally disabled woman who grew up blindingly poor and was considered “not white” for most of her life, at a time when “not white” made her lesser.
Cher is a fucking goddess and anyone who wants to come for her had better fucking watch out.
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