<$BlogItemControl$>

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

 

Crushes, crushed and crushing

Everyone in the blogosphere seems to be waxing nostalgic lately. On the weekend, Phantom Scribbler evoked the essence of my 1970s childhood with a post that crossed from Darth Vader to Peter and the Wolf; Mililou posted a great quiz on kid-TV from the 1970s, and then there was my own memories of a mediated childhood from the week before.

So when I was looking at your suggestions for blog topics, Dean Dad's suggestion of worst celebrity crushes struck me as perfectly timely. (And when you're done here, click on over to Dean Dad's hilarious reproduction of a freshman essay comparing and contrasting Brokeback Mountain and Curious George. It's painfully funny.)

See, I'm a bit of an expert on crushes, in that I always have one. I love crushes, and no, that's not an oxymoron. My first celebrity crush was Davy Jones from the Monkees. My best friend, Jennifer Morgan, was going to marry Shaun Cassidy, and I was going to marry Davy Jones, and we were going to live across the street from each other just like we did then, and raise our families together. Since I ended up being 5'8" tall, I think Davy Jones would have come up to around my sternum.

That crush didn't last long, but for years I had a major thing for Donny Osmond. My cousin gave me this album and I nearly wore it out for playing "Puppy Love" over and over and over again.

Then Star Wars came out, I was instantly in love with Luke Skywalker. I had a crush on Mark Hamill, too, but by that time I could understand that he was just an actor playing a part, and lived far away in America, and we would probably never meet. But Luke Skywalker, I pined for. I read the Star Wars tie-in novel, and in the scene where Luke is confronted by the angry Tuskan Raider on the sand dune while searching for R2D2 and he faints, my nine-year-old heart melted with his vulnerability.

I went through the same Tiger Beat phase as every other preteen I know, and spent endless hours clipping out photos of John Stamos, Willie Aames and Andrew Stevens. Scott Baio in particular was a favourite of this era in crushdom.

When I started high school, I upgraded my little suitcase record player for an actual stereo, and I packed away my Donny Osmond album for a little Canadian content in the form of Bryan Adams. I had a crush on him through most of high school, and remember being endlessly jealous of an early boyfriend's sister who actually met Bryan Adams on a train to Toronto in 1984. He's still high on my "celebrities I would love to meet someday" list.

Yikes, this is getting ugly - okay, let's hit the 'fast forward' button and skim through the 1980s and 1990s... George Michael, Rob Lowe, Michael Stipe, John Cusack, Brad Pitt (circa Legends of the Fall), and Cary Elwes from The Princess Bride (actually, it was more Westley that I had the crush on).

Today, I'd have to say that I still have a crush on Evan Farmer, the host of While You Were Out, and Ewan McGregor - especially after seeing Moulin Rouge again and again. And just this weekend we watched Elizabethtown and I finally get why everybody is going on about Orlando Bloom. And quite frankly, I wouldn't kick Harrison Ford out of bed for eating crackers, either. And speaking of Elizabethtown, he's not much to look at, but I am head over heels in love with the soul of Cameron Crowe. And Douglas Coupand. And Nick Hornby.

Okay, that's more than enough from me. What about you? Dish it - who are your celebrity crushes, past or present?