Phoenicia Loves Malicious Gossip

Cher is the epitome of passion.




I've loved her ever since:

--the Lori Davis Hair Care infomercial. I was obsessed with it. I think it had something to do with the ladies in the laboratory and the flamethrower. And Ted Danson's strange cameo.
--she answered the question, "How do you feel about men" with the response, "With my fingers!" Oh, the manhandling glee in her voice.
--her first appearance on David Letterman in 1986, when, less than a minute into the interview (which was focusing on her perfume) she said, "Is this as good as it gets?" Then, when David Letterman asked her why she had previously refused to come on his show, she assertively responded:






--she turned the gossip mongering in the early '80's about her active lovelife into Billboard gold with "If I Could Turn Back Time" in 1989. The song peaked at No. 3, but became infamous when MTV banned the video from their before-9pm rotation. In the video, Cher conquers a warship and masters a squadroon of lusty sailors. She was my hero. See a send-up of the tabloid roar over Cher's sexlife:




--she was Rocky's biker-badass mother in "Mask" (a role that won her Best Actress from the Cannes Jury).
--she mouthed the words on her tv concerts, preferring to make her spectacle out of dance and costume, as if she had nothing to prove.
--she had everything to prove
--she became the doyenne of the gay community. I feel like Miss Jack McFarland:




In a later episode, Jack feels forced to trash his Cher doll in front of his other gay co-workers who mock her. He later fishes her out of the trash and declares his worship to the nay-sayers.

Cher is the patron vamp of reinvention. She's a postmodern dream. She's a product now of a machine, her voice filtered through the vocoder. She begins her farewell show with a nod to desire, covering U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." And then some banter about the current crop of wanna-be divas. Half-smiling, half-serious, she says, "Follow this, you bitches."

Meaning, worship me. Meaning, there is no meaning after me.