BUT SO WHAT?
Cher fan, 36, determined to unseat Blaz
anticipate much dating elected.
“Now I have to have the police detail come with me on the date,” she joked.
“I can’t imagine there’s many men who would want to put up with that. So, um, we’ll focus on the job first and see what happens. But I just feel — it’s got to be awkward.”
She is a devoted fan of Cher — she has seen her in concert 28 times — and of Beatles great John Lennon.
“A Republican who loves John Lennon and Cher,” she said, if she’s aware of the irony.
Lennon is the roundabout way she got started in another hobby — sketching.
She visited an art studio in her district where the owner had painted the Beatles, and asked him to teach her to draw John Lennon. He did, and since then she’s expanded her scope, sketching Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, renderings that sit behind her desk in Albany.
She’s decried the mayor’s statue commission, and was especially aggrieved by last week’s vandalism of a sculpture of Roosevelt on horseback outside the Museum of Natural History.
“The city is becoming divided. A whole bunch of groups feel alienated, and Teddy Roosevelt has been attacked!” she said. “Even Teddy Roosevelt is not safe in de Blasio’s New York. He’s my hero.”
She’ll have another chance to take her gripes to the mayor on Wednesday, at the final debate before the election.
She had a strong performance in the first, but was a bit overshadowed by a circuslike atmosphere. That night, she carried a good luck charm: a coin depicting Joan of Arc. On the back, it reads: “St. Joan of Arc, give me the fortitude to defeat my fears and the strength to fight for what I believe in.”
A while back, she told Savino she planned to be like Joan of Arc — to “save New York City.”
“So [Savino] says, ‘You know that Joan of Arc was burned at the stake, right?’ ” Malliotakis recalled.
“I said, ‘Yeah. But only after she won.’ ”