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Her acolytes share their tales of devotion, and empty their wallets - again and again - for tickets to their idol's farewell tour, now in its third year.

BY MELISSA DRIBBEN

Cherish those wigs, sequins and Barbie dolls - only 56 days remain until Cher performs for the very last time on tour.

Really.

The very, very, very last time.

There are cynics who will say this is just a publicity stunt and that, after a farewell tour that has lasted three years and more than 300 performances, Cher is probably only taking a sabbatical. But among the millions who idolize, fetishize, rhapsodize and otherwise believe in Cher's supreme sequined wonderfulness, it's not worth taking the chance. They're buying the tickets. They're lemming it to Hollywood and East Rutherford and points in between. If the end is near, they need to bear witness.

It took Stephanie Floyd, a 34-year-old dental equipment supplier from Horsham, Pa., a whole year to save up $750 for a ticket to Cher's New Jersey concert.

But can a 58-year-old icon who has spent her whole life before fans really say goodbye?

We have consulted an expert: Cher Scholar, author of the marginally well-known but completely authentic online Cher-centric advice column www.cherscholar.com.

Cher Scholar, a.k.a. Mary Ladd, tells us that the high priestess of kitsch is really saying ta-ta. And that it's high time she did.

"I'm ready for the concert tour to end," says Ladd. "And I would think she'd be bored with it too, doing the same set over and over."

Ladd, a 35-year-old writer, formerly of Lancaster, Pa., but now of Los Angeles, has been a Cher fan since 1977, when she was 7. She went to Sarah Lawrence and majored in English, and, given the intellectual standards on the campus, she had to hide her love of all things Cher.

"I had to go underground," she recalls.

How to explain the attraction to the woman who started her career at 16 as Sonny Bono's hippie wife and ended up descending via chandelier onto a stage with enough wattage to electrify several Third World countries?

From "Bang-Bang (My Baby Shot Me Dead)" to "Believe," Cher - born Cherilyn Sarkisian - has been unrivaled in the art of personal reinvention. Go-go dancer, hippie, outcast, sitcom star, serious Academy-Award-winning actress, and ultra Vegas glam queen with plumage, she shed stylistic skins like a python and inhabited new ones that invariably fit tightly. Without doubt, Sonny's other (and ultimately more commercially successful) half holds the celebrity record for most-ripped abs and navel exposure over four decades.

"Many of her fans feel they are misfits," said Ladd. "Cher made good even though she didn't look like the typical buxom blonde. People admire her ability to survive the hard knocks of business and the critics, who have always been harsh."

Floyd, a Cher fan for more than 25 years, says that she has been stunned by the lengths some people are willing to go in their worship of Cher.

"I love Cher, but don't eat, sleep and live Cher," says Floyd. "I have a life. I have a job and a boyfriend."

True, she says, the April 13 concert in East Rutherford. N.J., will be her fourth time seeing Cher on the farewell tour. "But she's changed some of her costumes and will be performing some different songs."

Floyd's $750 ticket is a record for her, and she'll be attending with an equally Cher-besotted friend. "That's the most I've ever paid and the closest I've ever been to the stage. Tenth row. On some Web sites, second-row tickets are going for $1,200 each."

Floyd traces her devotion to Cher to her strict Catholic upbringing. "I was well-behaved. I didn't step out of line, never did drugs, I don't drink or smoke cigarettes. To listen to Cher was as close to being bad as I got."

She's preparing gifts to offer Cher at the concert, one of the last venues on the tour. Floyd's voluminous Cher collection includes 52 LP albums, cassettes, CDs, 21 signed photos that she bought on e-Bay, two Cher dolls, some concert shirts, all of her movies on DVD and VHS, and some miscellaneous "stuff."

Others are equally enraptured and even have impersonated Cher.

"I have seen the Farewell Tour six times," Jeffrey Clagett wrote in an e-mail, which contained a photograph of him in Cher drag at an AIDS benefit. Clagett, 38, a full-time student from Baltimore, owns Cher's complete oeuvre and a Smithsonian-worthy collection of Cher dolls. He was drawn to Cher because he had an extremely difficult childhood and admired her irreverence.

"She has guts, talent and brains," he wrote. "She would have never had the staying power that she has if she had listened to the critics consistently trash her."

As dedicated a fan as he is (he has two Cher-related tattoos), Clagett draws the line at bankruptcy.

"In some Yahoo Cher groups, peeps are talking about taking out second mortgages on their homes to see the final show."

Floyd says that all good things must come to an end, but she's sad that the tour is ending.

"I completely understand Cher's reasons for ending the tour. My biggest dream is to meet Cher and have 10 minutes with her to tell her how her music has saved my life."

As a child, Cher Scholar Ladd loved the entertainer's glamour. Her interest shifted as she got older. "I like to take pop culture and explicate it," she said. "I think sometimes when people try to do something lowbrow, they can hit on something sublime and wonderful."

Cher Scholar admits that the final, three-year swing has tested the loyalty of the faithful. Along the way, there have been a few false stops.

At first, a year or two ago, Cher Scholar says, Toronto was supposed to be the last show. Then it was no, make that Las Vegas. Then no, no, this is so much fun, one more time in Las Vegas. Then well, since you insist, why not? New Zealand. But now, she swears, she's hanging up her bustier on April 30 at the Hollywood Bowl.

She chose it as her last stop because it was there, 40 years ago, that she first performed with Sonny.

So 56 more days is her final answer. And although they mourn the end of an era, her fans promise they will still need her on Day 57 and indefinitely thereafter.

"I will be sorry to see her go," said Jami Whelan of Norristown, Pa., who went to four of the farewell shows - one in Philadelphia, one in Atlantic City, and both in Vegas. "She looks great and sounds much better now than ever," Whelan said.

Millions care.

Millions more don't.

"None of her music ever touched me," said Dee Nichols, a 39-year-old real-estate agent. "It was not heartfelt."

Noreen MacCullough, 51, a nurse at Philadelphia's Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, admits that she regrets never seeing Cher perform in person.

"She is an icon. I remember her and Sonny Bono on TV. She was so cute. And then after they broke up, she dated younger men. She was ahead of her time."

In some ways, Cher has been a good role model for women, said Ann Fossum, 48, a colleague of MacCullough's. "After the divorce, rather than disappearing, she went on to become a strong figure."

Cher has lots more things she wants to do in her career, she has said. An album and a movie musical, perhaps. More acting roles.

But all will have to wait until her final tour has its Hollywood ending.

Cher Scholar, who has attended five of the shows in the final tour, plans to get a ticket to the Hollywood Bowl one, too.

"I will go to it because it's the last show," she said. "If it is the last show."

Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer