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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Cher
Read between
November 20 - December 7, 2024
Right.” My smooth-talking Armenian father, Johnnie Sarkisian, was Mr. Wrong from the outset, and when he asked my mother to jitterbug with him at a Harry James big band dance in Fresno, California, in 1944, her instincts warned her to be careful. The spoiled youngest son of a large Armenian family, Johnnie was a year older than Mom but wore the kind of flashy clothes and jewelry that gave him an air of greater maturity. He wasn’t her type and was too short for her taste, but when they danced together her blouse got caught on his shirt button and she literally couldn’t get away. By the time
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Fresno
Then six months after my birth, Johnnie came home one night and told her that he’d lost his father’s trucking business in a card game. Everything was gone. My mother couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
Gambling Games
It began for me when my parents took me to see Dumbo at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre when I was five. That historic landmark, built on Hollywood Boulevard nearly twenty years before I was born, was a paradise for a kid like me. It was as big as a city and as amazing to me as the Great Wall of China. It was everything. If you couldn’t have an out-of-body experience in that magical place, you were never gonna have one. Going there for the first time in my patent Mary Jane shoes, I was speechless with excitement, not least because it had the most colossal candy counter in the history of the
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Dreams ko6gvk
I don’t recall anything about my parents’ wedding in Vegas, but then I barely remember any of my mother’s weddings, because most of them happened when I was really young. Or perhaps I didn’t go. What I do remember is that not that long after we moved back to Beeman with him, my silver-tongued father talked Mom into relocating two hundred miles north to an area of Fresno known as Little Armenia. We were to live with his family—more strangers that I’d never met and didn’t know existed until that moment. Mamaw put Gee and me on the train from LA to Fresno by ourselves.
Move to Fresno!
