Cher and Cher Alike: on the Magic of Large Gatherings

A couple months back I was able to cross something off my bucket list: I went to see Cher live.

Yes, that Cher. The Cher. The 73-year-old dynamo who started out as a 16-year-old singer, the one-of-a-kind performer who began her career as part of a duo, crooning alongside now-deceased ex-husband Sonny Bono.

And as a medium, I’ll tell you it was one heck of an experience.

I’ve always been a fan of music, and especially live music. There’s something truly magical about people coming together to enjoy a favorite performer or band. Music is something we’ve had ever since we began pounding sticks on rocks and I believe it’s a very primal part of our nature. And when people come together to enjoy that? When people come together for a short period of time to forget their stresses, their normal everyday worries? To become lifted away to Somewhere Else?

That’s magic.

I remember my Mom loving Cher when I was about 8 or 9 years old, playing Cher’s cassette tape of Heart of Stone over and over again. I remember my Mom and her friends and sisters coming together to watch Mask, the heart-wrenching performance she brought to audiences as the mother of a boy with severe facial deformities, the performance that won her a Golden Globe award for Best Actress. Even at that age, I always thought it peculiar that people would get together to intentionally watch something that brought about those kinds of emotions.

Cher has always been with us, and I’ll guarantee anyone reading this will know who she is, whether they like her or not. She’s the only singer who has put out a Top Ten single over four consecutive decades. I have memories of being in my late teens when Cher came out with her Believe album, an album where she reinvented herself with club beats and techno songs. While it wasn’t my cup of tea at the time, I really love it now. There’s not much that she’s put out that I don’t love. And it was this reinvention of her, as a 50-something-year-old woman who would dip her toes into a musical genre that most folks wouldn’t think of as her generation’s, that really impressed me. She didn’t care. She knew what she wanted. She went for it and didn’t apologize once as she did so.

And while I love her music, while I love her acting performances (The Witches of Eastwick is still one of my favorite movies) there’s something I love about her even more.

She’s unapologetic. Love or her or hate her, she’s unapologetic about who she is and what she wants out of life. She’s daring, knows who she is as a person, and doesn’t compromise the vision of her artistry. When she accepted her Academy Award for Best Actress in Moonstruck her speech included the following couple of lines, which I love: “And I don't think that this means that I am somebody, but I guess I'm on my way. Thank you.” She’s humble, grateful, and still knows who she is...she’s confident, and if there’s one attribute I’ve longed to cultivate in my life, it’s that. If you’re interested in seeing her speech, follow this link here.

So when I had the opportunity to see her in December, I had to take it. I went with a dear friend of mine, someone who loves her as much as I do. When we were having dinner before the show in Boston, we were at a sports pub with a big screen TV that was playing the Patriots, but our waitress was playing Cher over the crowd. When her arguably-biggest hit came on, Believe, the crowd was singing it while cheering for the Patriots. It was kind of surreal.

After dinner, as we were joined by the thousands of people creeping slowly into TD Bank North in Boston, the energy in the air was palpable. There were people in their Sixties and Seventies who grew up with her. There were people in their early Twenties who knew her and loved her. She was truly bringing together generations of people who loved music and just wanted to experience joy, even if for a short while. I was up in the stands, and while the opening band was playing, a woman down on the floor, who had to be in her Seventies while wearing white bell-bottoms with long leather fringe up and down each leg, was just dancing her heart out.

Cher does that to people; she brings the life out of them.

And Cher is funny. She told a story after her opening number, a really funny anecdote about going on the David Letterman show and calling him an “Asshole” (you can see the original video here). At the end of the story, she started talking about her age. How she was 73, and while she wasn’t thrilled about it, there wasn’t much about it that she could do. And right as she ended her story, right before she kicked it off into another number, she asked the audience one question:

“What’s your grandma doing tonight?”

The crowd, literally, went wild.

It was 90 minutes of pure gold. She played her classics, her contemporary hits, all the while changing costumes and dancing with people a third of her age. And while I was enjoying this once-in-a-lifetime event, I opened up my psychic senses a little bit, to get a sense of what was going on with the audience.

Everyone - unless they’re a truly evil, wicked person - has what I call Umbrella Spirits around them. Ancestors, loved ones, friends, even pets who stay close to a person, wanting them to be well, happy, loved & loving. For every living person in this stadium, there were at least 2 or 3 of these spirits there. The place was packed - both with the Living and the Dead, and all of them were enjoying this evening of music, memories, and joy. 

Cher also had a couple of numbers where she sang her old hits “I Got You Babe” and “The Beat Goes On,” duets with the now-deceased Sonny Bono. And Sonny was there in spirit, enjoying every moment of it. During these numbers it dawned on me - Sonny was getting energy from these performances. And it was a circle. Spirits, in general, get energy from the living when we remember them, make offerings to them, and otherwise venerate them. Sonny was getting energy on the other side from these performances. He was very much there, watching over the entire performance. He, in turn, was also giving energy to Cher. 

It also felt like Cher’s mother and sister were in attendance as spirits, and upon writing this, I went to do some research. Both her mother and sister are still living, so the spirits I was feeling were her grandmother and a woman that was very much like Cher’s sister while she was living. I didn’t have conversations with them, I just saw that they were there - the first thing I’ll feel from a spirit is their gender, and their attitude towards their loved ones. That’s why I often get mother and grandmother, brother and father energy confused until I open up a channel of communication. Initially, I often get brother and father energy confused, as I am both a brother of a little sister and the father of a 16-year-old; the type of loving, protective energy I feel for them is universal to every man who ever loved someone and was protective of them.

I always encourage - thanks to the wisdom of the spirits who speak through me - that everyone should cultivate love and joy in their lives. While there are many priorities we must maintain in this world - survival, comfort, etc. the presence of love and joy in our lives is so, so important. When I speak of joy and bliss, when I speak of truly having fun, I speak to the kind of fun that helps people forget the weight of their lives. That they should “check out” for a bit, if you will, so they can recharge. Concerts offer this, as does going to the movies, all those experiences where we get caught up with a group of people to experience something bigger and more fun than ourselves...something where we forget ourselves for a while.

This performance of Cher’s was an incredible experience - there were thousands in attendance, both living and dead, and everyone who was there was living. The spirits in attendance filled the empty space of the auditorium, stacked in above their living loved ones like many pages in a book. This expression of love, this expression of joy, it really felt like what we’re supposed to do as the living. It became one of my favorite concert performances of all time, and I’ve seen a lot of concerts. Next time she comes around the East Coast on tour, I’ll be going again. And if she doesn’t make it around again, if that happens to be her last time in Boston for whatever reason, I’ll always have that item checked off my bucket list.

But If I Could Turn Back Time and do it all over again? 

Better Believe I would. In a heartbeat.