Cher

When I was about 5 or 6 I found a long black wig in my dress up chest, put it on and from that moment I made everyone call me Cher, her movie career was taking off at the time and Mermaids was my top favorite movie. I mean how could anyone look at this poster and not want to see this movie? I loved Cher because she was so fun to impersonate, and so memorable. She always got her man and did it with style, she also had this "I do what I want" attitude that I was never brave enough to have.
I was Cher for a good two weeks of my childhood.  A few weeks later my obsession turned from Cher to....

Lydia from Beetlejuice. She put me in touch with my dark side. If you have seen the movie in the scene when she meets the ghosts that try to terrorize her house she admits to being "strange and unusual", that's why she can see them,  because she believed she was strange and unusual well I did too, and maybe I would see a ghost or somehow become psychic.  One night as my family watched T.V. I got some scissors and cut my bangs to look like Lydia. My brothers and sister just called them my "Pee Wee Herman bangs", and they did look like that. My mom was furious because the next day was our Mother Daughter photo shoot. Those pictures still aren't hung up in the house, they are tucked safely away in a photo album. I loved everything scary, my brother Josh was a great story teller and he worked out in the wilderness so he always told me ghost stories about his job and he unknowingly fed into this delusion I had. It also helped that I am native American and I feel like we just attract supernatural things into our lives, at least that's what I am told. So naturally I assumed I was magic in someway.

This picture perfectly represents how powerful and awesome I was when I was ten.



Being this cool little kid, I totally had a belief in physics, the supernatural and the strange and unusual events that could and I hoped would happen in my life. At one point in my life I was so sure I was a witch that on my 16th birthday Bette Middler would show up at my house and say I was her long lost daughter and I was now ready to learn the family secrets. To say I had an overactive imagination would be an under statement.
At the end of 7th grade student council elections were going on and I was in the  running. I  was
 so sure I was going to win. Completely side tracked by boys and my surety,  I forgot to make
posters to let people know to vote for me. So I took some colored markers and wrote on some lined paper, "Miss Cleo says Vote for JENNA!" And I won.

 

 
Now my suspicions about being physic and needing to put myself around that only got bigger. For awhile I was obsessed with going to fortune tellers and psychics, in hopes that they would tell me I had a supernatural gift and I should learn how to make it stronger, and of course the romantic in me, hoped they would tell me my prince would come out of the mist and take me a beautiful mansion and we'd be husband and wife and baby makes three. I have been to countless psychics, it's addicting! The possibility of someone knowing what you don't, a glimpse into the future of what you should be and who you will love the rest of your life? Who wouldn't get addicted to that?     One day I went to the dancing crane in salt lake city. The psychic there had great vibe I was hopeful she would tell me that prince was on his way, and she did! She said that'd I'd meet him  within the next three months, she even gave me her phone number and a little note saying if it didn't happen to call her. Well three months later and it didn't happen I was tempted to call her and tell her that she was a phony, and that she hurt my feelings. It made me think... AM I THAT EASY TO READ? after a lot of thought and reflection, I realized, I make my own future, I am me, that's priceless and unreadable, and maybe even a little physic for my own sitches in life.  Yes I might have a flair for fantasy, as well as  the strange and unusual but the second you start to question your path because someone who doesn't know you  says they are physic, you need to question how well you think you know yourself. IF you did know yourself you wouldn't need an outsiders or anyone else's  opinion on you and when you will meet your man, or which path to take in life. You just need you. After all that's all we really have.   If you need to embody Cher or someone else for a second to figure out who you are that's okay, as long as you do find out. (BTW I do suggest being Cher for a day or two she is so fearless.)  Embrace the crazy and conquer your fears (easier said then done) and make your own future so you can read it for yourself.  In the immortal words of Cher "Until you’re ready to look foolish, you’ll never have the possibility of being great."