One-hit wonders pack the halls of Hey, What’s That Song?, all jostling for space and attention just as they did during their brief heyday decades ago. Some of these artists managed to stick around in the limelight for years after their solitary hit; others grabbed a cup of coffee in the big leagues (as they say in baseball parlance) and were never heard from again.

Chéri formed in Montreal in the early 80’s when teen friends Rosalind Hunt and Lise Cullerier were encouraged by Rosalind’s mother, Geraldine, to start a singing duo. Geraldine topped the US Dance Chart in 1980 after two decades of struggle to achieve any kind of success as a singer, and now she had accumulated a little juice in the industry. That juice would go towards Chéri. The girls possessed talent, and Geraldine had recently written a song for them about the potential of things going wrong — a song which she thought had the potential to go right.

The adage known as Murphy’s Law originates with American aerospace engineers in the late 1940’s, although approximations existed beforehand. The law reached peak cultural awareness with a bestselling book published in 1977 and began to tail off after a so-so Charles Bronson movie sported the title in 1986. You don’t hear it referenced much anymore so I suspect people under say, 30, might not even know what Murphy’s Law refers to, which is the following statement: “If anything can go wrong, it will.”

There are hundreds of corollaries and addendums, mostly relating to engineering, design, computer programming, management — complex systems. For example, there’s…..

Harvard Law: “Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume, humidity, and other variables, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.”

Or there’s Anthony’s Law Of The Workshop: “Any tool, when dropped, will roll into the least accessible corner of the room.”

As a writer, one of my favorites is Muphry’s Law, which states: “If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.”

In this case, things did actually go right for Chéri — at least, initially. When released as a single in 1982, “Murphy’s Law” topped the US Dance Chart — to my knowledge, the only time a mother and daughter have each hit #1 on a Billboard chart (separately that is — The Judds have done it quite a few times together) and the song also just edged into the Top 40. The duo released two albums in quick succession but “Murphy’s Law” proved to be their only success and they quickly disappeared.

O’Toole’s Commentary On Murphy’s Law: “Murphy was an optimist.”

Cole’s Law: “Thinly sliced cabbage.”

Note: all of the Laws mentioned above were taken from Arthur Bloch’s 1977 book, Murphy’s Law, and Other Reasons Why Things Go Wrong.