Cher - The Other Woman:

It was probably totally inappropriate for us to even think of doing something like this on our honeymoon. But it was the summer of 1965, after all. We were just kids; both of us were only nineteen. The ground under our feet seemed to be literally quaking with social unrest and unease. Vietnam was beginning to blow up in our collective faces. It seemed a sure thing that sooner or later I would be on my way to join my buddies fighting the VC. On college campuses across the country, drugs and love may not have been exactly free, but they were both certainly cheap. So on that hot afternoon on the second day of our honeymoon, as we sat propped up on that double bed in a tiny, slightly stale motel room in a long-forgotten Oklahoma backwater town, my wife and I finally came up for air just long enough to flip on the TV set. We probably weren't the first couple to watch television on their honeymoon, of course, but we were surely among the select few who witnessed history in the process. For on that very afternoon, and for the very first time in history, on a fuzzy little black and white screen, we watched as a young couple named Sonny and Cher sang a song that even today I cannot get out of my head. There was no way I could know at the time that Cher would go on to become much more than simply a respite from the intensity of the lovemaking of that past couple of days. Cher would in time become a kind of cultural milestone for me; an almost goddess-like figure who would effortlessly pass in and out of my life over the next four decades. At times, it seemed as if she was pointing the way. Cher's many failures and her astounding successes would somehow strangely seem to mirror my own, as least in regard to their unpredictability. And although I'd never given it much thought until recently, I think Cher somehow became a kind of phantom "other woman" in my life that afternoon some forty-plus years ago. Whenever Cher warbled the title words to that song: "I Got You Babe"-- well, I suppose that in some eldritch way, she actually did.