My former partner bought our tickets to Cher’s Dressed to Kill Tour as soon as the sale went live in the fall of 2013. The show was scheduled for months later, which gave her adequate time to acquire the tank top she wanted that questionably depicted the iconic performer as Che Guevara. Together we had already watched Cher’s films, most of which were old to me and new to her, and in the car we often blasted Heart of Stone.
Since my ex claimed to be physically incapable of singing, I gallantly covered both Cher and Peter Cetera’s parts in the duet “After All.” If you understood just how poorly I sing, and what an enthusiastic audience she was, you would know how deeply she loved me. Though “After All” wasn’t our duet — that distinction belonged to “Islands in the Stream” (with Barbra Streisand and Céline Dion’s “Tell Him” earning an honorable mention solely for its video’s comedic value) — it was, like everything else on Heart of Stone, something I couldn’t bear to hear after that relationship ended abruptly in early 2014.
I sold the Cher tickets as the date of the concert approached and avoided discussing it afterward with those who had been in attendance. Years later, I introduced Crankenstein to Moonstruck, which is not only my favorite Cher film but one of my favorite films of the 1980s. But I couldn’t bring myself to listen to Heart of Stone again until yesterday. It had been a trying day, full of things I hadn’t wanted to do and small physical humiliations. I longed to find comfort in something that reminded me of happier days, and the musical stylings of ‘angelic Cher’ were all that came to mind. (The moniker was an in-joke, like my Cher-related nickname of Lamfooo.)
I’d grown up listening to Cher via my mom, who played Heart of Stone nearly as often as she belted Carly Simon, Carole King and Whitney Houston. As a teen I’d enthusiastically discovered “The Way of Love,” a 1971 cover that was gay no matter how you sliced it, and loved Cher’s vanity-free performance as Meryl Streep’s lesbian roommate in Silkwood. Like the rest of the world, I embraced the thumping autotuned joys of “Believe” in 1998, ignoring lyrics that sounded ridiculously silly at 15 and embarrassingly relevant at 31, when I was freshly jilted and it followed me through supermarkets and made me want to cry.
For much of my life I’d watched Moonstruck annually, sitting alone in the glow of the TV and wondering if I would ever join the ranks of those who “ruin ourselves and […] break our hearts and love the wrong people and die.” It sounded more romantic in theory than it ended up being in practice, though I wouldn’t say I loved the wrong person. Once I’d found my Ronny Cammareri, or Rob Camilletti, or the Cher to my talentless Sonny — any of those will do — that wistfulness departed, replaced by gratitude when we watched Moonstruck at home together or Burlesque in theaters on its opening day.
Even Heart of Stone sounded different then, more raucously fun than it had been when I was a kid. That’s what I hoped to recapture yesterday, revisiting it for the first time in nearly a decade. I made it through “If I Could Turn Back Time” and “Just Like Jesse James,” and skipped ahead to “After All,” avoiding the overwrought hilarity of “Emotional Fire” and “Love on a Rooftop,” songs that almost made us cry from laughter when we parsed their lyrics too closely all those years ago.* For a few minutes, Cher lifted a heavy weight from my shoulders, reminding me of a long-lost time of “endless nights, when we were happy living young and foolish lives.” And then, with a signature Loretta Castorini slap to the face, I snapped out of it.
*I expect Crankenstein to look up “Love on a Rooftop” at some point when she’s bored before bed, and to greet me with a concerned “‘We couldn’t make the love stop?'” as I wander in from brushing my teeth, followed by priapism jokes.