Cher's West Side Story and Following Your Weirdest Thoughts

In her 1978 television special, Cher introduced the classic Broadway musical, West Side Story. She looked out at her audience smiling and said, 'I will be playing all the parts.'

And then she played all the parts in a twelve minute version of the show.

She announced in April she's developing a full length, stage version which according to What's On Stage will include Cher-specific versions of the songs including SomeCher and Ameri-Cher.

So far there's no word on when it will open, but I would give my left boob to see it.

Today I began the painful process of forgiving Chappell Roan for cancelling her Paris show. It had to be done. After all is it really fair of me to wish she'd denied the world that iconic VMAs performance, with its beautiful celebration of Julie d'Aubigny, just so I could see her perform in what would have been one of her last small shows ever?

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone she talked about her journey to making the bold, weird pop anthems she's now famous for. How hard she fought her first label over Pink Pony Club, the professional insistence that she needed to develop couldn't get too extreme with her image.

A couple of months ago I saw Don Hertzfeldt's It's Such a Beautiful Day, preceded by his short film Me. They are strange, existential meanderings that suck you in without really explaining anything and I cannot recommend them enough.

Ever since seeing those films I've been shouting on a loop that art should be about following your weirdest thoughts. Art should be about playing all the parts in your favourite musical. It should be pop bangers about stripping. It should be putting a stick figure through absolute hell.

It should be about tapping into the thoughts you dismiss as too silly, or too absurd, or too complicated for public consumption and putting them on a plate. It should make people say things like, ooft, and, oh wow, and holy shit.

There's a lot of risk in that, obviously. Both emotionally and financially, if you're trying to make a living from your art. I am not good and being emotionally vulnerable and I have no money but honestly those aren't the considerations that scare me the most about this whole prospect.

What scares me is what if I've lost touch with my weirdest thoughts?

If I was suddenly gifted a year to make whatever I wanted to make, we're talking real, self-indulgent shit, would I find something there to make? I'm not saying I don't have any ideas, I have a long list of things I want to write but never have time to. I'm saying what if I sit down to work on them and find that they come out bland and homogenous.

What if the past couple of decades spent just trying to make enough to live on has cut off the connection between the most fucked up parts of my psyche? What if a childhood spent desperately trying to fit in has sanded down my rough edges?

But then the only answer is, as it always is, that you just have to do it anyway.

A couple of weeks before my first novel was published, I had a panic about it. I didn't think it sounded interesting. I had a big cry about it and said to my partner it just sounds ordinary.

What he said in response is the best piece of creative advice I've ever heard. He said, It sounds like you. That's why, to you, it sounds ordinary.

Of course the problem with that is that you have to keep believing it.

Follow your weirdest thoughts and keep believing they're weird even when you've been following them for so long they feel ordinary to you.