Young Love and Inappropriate Crushes.
A friend and I were discussing first loves recently and it got me thinking about how inappropriate my first loves were. I’m not talking about the flesh and bones of a real boy, but about early pashes of my girlhood.
One of my first crushes was Donny Osmond. I was going to marry him, you know. The fact that he was in Utah and I was in Scotland, he was Mormon and I was C of S, or that he was drop dead gorgeous and I was a less than attractive young girl never came into it. This was love in its purest form. I chose a purple carpet for my bedroom – that was Donny’s favourite colour, dontcha know – and wore purple dungarees. I listened to his music non-stop and *knew* he was singing to me. If you’re an adult they call this mental instability, but in a ten year old girl it’s considered cute. Hmm.
It was impossible to have a thing for Donny and the other young hottie of the time, David Cassidy; it had to be one or the other. The rivalry between the Donny and David camps was huge, a bit like the Blur/Oasis debacle but with screaming and hormones. Beiber Fever has got nothing on Osmondmania. To this day I remember that I sat in row T, seat 26 in the Glasgow Apollo when I went to see them. In fact, I’m sure I still have the ticket secreted away somewhere safe.
I grew older and away from the Osmonds and by the time I was at University I swithered between B.A. Robertson and Barry Manilow. Stop laughing! It was the music, honestly! You listen to Tryin’ To Get The Feeling Again and tell me you don’t get shivers. And BA was tall, smart and Scottish. Of course my heart was his!
Around this time my total worship of Cary Grant started and that has endured to this day. Look at the photo: those eyes, those lips… OK, I’m back in the room. If you look in the dictionary you’ll see Cary Grant’s name against the definition for handsome.
More recent crushes which, I have been told are ‘odd’ have been Christopher Walken (the guy just oozes ‘cool’), Gabriel Byrne (especially in the film Stigmata) and Hannibal Lecter. Look, I explained this one before and you can read about it here.
Odd crushes seem to run in the family because my eighteen year old daughter has an enormous crush on Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England. I kinda get it…
I have left the strangest and oddest crush of all to the end. When I was a wee girl I went to piano lessons. I didn’t know of anybody else who played the piano apart from one man who was on TV a lot. He had his own show and appeared on sunday Night at the London Palladium almost as often as Bruce Forsythe. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you my first love. Liberace.
Fabulous!
So, who are your inappropriate crushes? Please share them with me so I don’t feel quite so strange!
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