When I was little, Sonny and Cher would be on TV when I was getting ready for school. I’d be putting on my sweet stirrup pants and avoiding my brother and sister smoking a joint to get through the bus ride to high school while being transfixed with this woman. Cher and I go way back. How lovely it is for me, and indeed, for all mankind, that Cher has been a powerhouse of fierceness from the mid 1960’s until today. Now let’s look at some excerpts from her Vanity Fair interview.
On the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s inability to recognize: “Sonny and I still aren’t in the [Rock and Roll] Hall of Fame, and it just seems kind of rude. Sonny was a good writer, and we started something that no one else was doing. We were weird hippies before there was a name for it, when the Beatles were wearing sweet little haircuts and round-collared suits…. We influenced a generation, and it’s like: What more do you want?”
On Chaz: “If I woke up tomorrow in a guy’s body, I would just kick and scream and cry and fucking rob a bank, because I cannot see myself as anything but who I am—a girl. I would not take it as well as Chaz has. I couldn’t imagine it. She’s a very smart girl—boy! This is where I get into trouble. My pronouns are fucked. I still don’t remember to call her ‘him.’”
On her work ethic: “I feel like a bumper car. If I hit a wall, I’m backing up and going in another direction. And I’ve hit plenty of fucking walls in my career. But I’m not stopping. I think maybe that’s my best quality: I just don’t stop.”
On Sarah Palin: “I got so obsessed with [C-SPAN] that it was kind of interfering with my life. Sarah Palin came on, and I thought, Oh, fuck, this is the end. Because a dumb woman is a dumb woman.”
On aging: “I think Meryl [Streep] is doing it great. The stupid bitch is doing it better than all of us! But I don’t like it. It’s getting in my way. I have a job to do, and it’s making my job harder.”
I love this woman. Anyone who can sing a song as catchy as “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” and call Meryl Streep a stupid bitch (jokingly, of course) gets a solid approval rating in my book.