Cher Armenian TV Interview

 

 

Exclusive interview to air on US-Armenia TV this week

Burbank, Calif. – The year was 1993. Cher boarded “one of those big airplanes that has no seating,” a DC-8 cargo ship, to Armenia. “It was such a rickety old plane and they had bolted these little seats in the back for us and given us a canister of oxygen.” Because of the wartime power shortage, they had to get to Yerevan before dark, “and we hit the runway as the sun went down.”

Cher recalls her trip to Armenia and discusses her Armenian heritage with Lusine Shahbazyan in an intimate and exclusive interview that will air for the first time this week on US-Armenia TV.

She’s a superstar with more than four decades of staying power. She has sold more than 100 million albums and is an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Golden Globe-winning performer. She has starred in movies and on television and has directed; she has been known for her tastes in fashion and men. Her life and her loves have been chronicled by media around the world, as Paul Chaderjian – who helped arrange the interview and participated in it – wrote in these pages in a Feb. 16, 2008, cover story.

The modern-day legend remembers entering a random coffee shop in Yerevan. “All the men were in there,” she says. “Some of the men were playing chess, but they didn’t have any coffee and they didn’t have any tea. But they were just in there. They were playing their chess. They were talking. They were all dressed properly, maybe a little bit of tatters, but so dignified. And it was the first time I thought, I’m an Armenian, I’m proud.”

Prompted by Lusine, Cher also speaks of her father, Garabed Sarkisian. He was an immigrant whose parents had survived the Armenian Genocide. He was a farmer, sometimes a truck driver, and a man Cher calls “charismatic, a little shady like a bad boy.”

“I don’t really look like anyone in my family, except my great grandmother and my father,” says Cher, whose parents divorced when she was two. She didn’t see her father again until she was 11. “When I was young, every once in a while, my mother would look at me with the strangest look on her face; and then when I saw my father, I realized why. Because we made the same faces, and I’d never seen him. And when I saw him, I realized why.”

“I liked him a lot,” she says, “but he’d been in prison.”

After her parent’s reunion, the family would often visit her father’s relatives in Fresno. “All of my relatives were living there, in Fresno. A huge family, and my great grandmother never learned to speak English. My grandmother spoke English, but she called women ‘he.’ She got [English] a little bit, but she didn’t get it great. But they were great. They were really happy to see me, and my grandmother taught me how to make sarma, kufta, and all kinds of things. I really enjoy and love the food. Armenian food is brilliant.”

The vibrant and ever-youthful Cher, 62, will appear at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas on April 25-26 and 28-29 and in the month of May. Bob Mackie has created more than a dozen new costumes and the 4,300-seat Colosseum has been fitted to provide state-of-the-art lighting and special effects to complement Cher’s chart-topping hits.

Source: Armenian Reporter

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