This
week's question: What was your most embarrassing early celebrity crush? (We've
filled it out with some YouTube tributes we found. Seriously, we did
not make these.)
Noel
Murray
Right
after Heathers came out, I spent a couple
of years smitten with Winona Ryder. Unlike Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, or any of
the other starlets intended to appeal to my generation, Ryder seemed like the
kind of girl I actually hung out with at my high school: smart, funny, a little
shy except around her friends, and a fan of J.D. Salinger and The Replacements.
Unfortunately, Ryder was more a personality type than an actress, and as she
continued to drain the life out of otherwise-good movies, I found it tougher to
justify my attraction. (She finally lost me for good with Reality Bites, though she almost won me
back later that same year with Little Women, arguably her last
noteworthy performance.) Later, I heard from a friend out in Hollywood that
Ryder in person was every bit as unstable as she'd been portrayed following her
shoplifting scandal. So alas, poor Winona… I guess I didn't know you that well.
I quickly returned to my first love: DynaGirl, erstwhile sidekick of Electra Woman.
Donna
Bowman
I
hope celebrity crushes don't reveal too much about one's "type," as
it were. Too frequently, one spends one's hormonal years in thrall to an image
that resembles one's eventual spouse not at all. A less secure woman would look
at her husband's Winona Ryder obsession, tally up the ways she does not
resemble Winona (let's start with "not waifish"), and start to wonder
whether she really is the woman of her husband's dreams. The same could be said
for my undying love for Lee Majors, a strong, silent type who first stole my heart
in The Six Million Dollar Man. At one point, I faked a month-long illness that
did not affect school attendance, but struck without fail on Sunday afternoon
so that I could skip evening church services and watch Steve Austin. When I discovered
that a local TV station showed The Big Valley on weekday mornings, I
spent some daily alone time with Lee by banishing the kids I was babysitting
that summer to their rooms. And I was everlastingly, marvelously warped when
the première episode of ABC's short-lived Saturday Night Live featured both Majors and
the Bay City Rollers; somehow my predilection for all things pop got blended
with my crush, and I've never fully recovered. If anybody out there has a copy
of the Scholastic Book Club paperback biography of Lee Majors that I toted
around in my Oakland Raiders satchel in fifth grade, could you send it my way?
Sean
O'Neal
I'd
like to pretend that my crushes on celebrities were limited to a very specific,
hormonally charged time, but the truth is, my mind still idles over the
unattainable touch of an ever-shifting coterie of famous women whom I know
logically are totally fake. Sadly, it's done so probably since I was 5, when my
dream was to grow up and marry Teri Garr. So in answering this question, I
actually had difficulty coming up with one definitive cringe-worthy crush; as
Nathan suggests below, they're all humiliating to some degree. I suppose I
could play it safe and mention the Drew Barrymore Playboy pictorial that ushered me
into manhood (nightly!), or go for a sentimental favorite like The Wonder
Years'
"Winnie Cooper" (that bitch!), or even aim for credibility by
mentioning that I totally had the hots for Janeane Garofalo (and still kinda
do). But truth be told, if you want to talk painfully,
can't-believe-I'm-telling-you-this embarrassing, there's only one name that
causes me to go all red in the face: Karen Duffy, former MTV VJ, Revlon
spokes-model, occasional shitty actress, and owner of the key to my heart for
most of my teen years. Why Karen Duffy? Who the fuck knows? I suppose that
besides being blessed with the sort of femme fatale eyebrows and killer gams
that make a man break into Raymond Chandler-speak, I always thought that
"Duff" had a sly, self-effacing way about her, the hint of a sharp
mind somewhere behind those big brown eyes. (Or, you know, that's what I told
myself while surreptitiously renting Blank Check.) My obsession ran so deep that as late as my
freshman year of college, I frequently waded into the wee hours of the HBO softcore wasteland to
catch Memory Run,
a painfully bad sci-fi flick with Duffy playing a man trapped in a woman's
body—and with her only topless sex scene. (Yes, I know it's a body
double. Shut up shut up shut up.) And as if all that weren't humiliating
enough, there are probably still some dubs of my high-school band's demo tape
floating around out there, tagged with a "hidden track" containing my
sorta-ironic, sorta-totally-serious musical ode to the "Charlie
Girl." If anyone has a copy… please burn that shit right now.
Steven
Hyden
What's more embarrassing: Writing a
fan letter to Candace Cameron, or writing a fan letter to Candace
Cameron because you think it could lead to possibly dating her and eventually
becoming friends with Kirk Cameron? Discuss.
Keith
Phipps
At
the tender age of 13, I rarely missed a chance to watch the video for "All
Cried Out" by Lisa Lisa And The Cult Jam (With Full Force) because I
thought lead singer Lisa Lisa (née Lisa Velez) was just beyond lovely. The song
was terrible ("my body never knew such pleasure / my heart never knew such
pai-ai-ain") but the singer, oh my. Looking at it now—which is
hard—I see a woman oppressed by makeup, hairspray, and ruffles in a way
common to the latter half of the '80s. There's probably an attractive woman
under all that, but I'm not sure what I saw at the time. Maybe it was the
cleavage-enhancing dress. Okay, it was almost certainly the cleavage-enhancing
dress.
Genevieve
Koski
Though
I vaguely remember a brief pre-kindergarten fascination with Danny
Wood—a.k.a. Rattail McMonkeyface from the New Kids On The Block—I
don't think any infatuation that preceded me being able to read rates as a "crush."
It was more like a mandatory statement of NKOTB allegiance that allowed me to
compare giant souvenir buttons and swap trading cards with my Children's World
peers. My first real (i.e. pubescent) celebrity crush is embarrassingly predictable,
if you consider that I was a suburban 13-year-old girl around the time both Romeo
+ Juliet and Titanic
came out. Yes, I blame Leonardo DiCaprio for my predilection for skinny boys with
floppy hair that continues to this day. I covered all the squealy teen-girl
bases: glossy cut-out pictures in my locker, a heart-framed "LD" written on my
backpack in White-Out, and a framed "autographed" photo that my mom forged as a
Christmas present. Though high school weaned me off that sort of behavior
pretty quickly, I continued to harbor a thing for Leo for a couple more years,
going as far as seeing The Man In The Iron Mask in the theater.
Thankfully, before The Beach came out, I discovered that real boys—even
the pimply-faced twerps I went to high school with—were much more fun…
Kyle
Ryan
As
a young man who discovered girls and pop culture in the '80s, it perhaps goes
without saying that I had a huge thing for Alyssa Milano. Why else would anyone
watch a dreadful sitcom like Who's The Boss? (not that I knew any better,
but still). And it goes without saying that I kind of rejoiced later when her
career devolved into B-movies that featured her naked or mostly naked. In my
pre-adolescence, I had an entire wall covered with Alyssa Milano pics culled
from teen-hysteria rags like Bop. Even worse: I had a phony "Missed Call"
message—written by me on a "while you were out" pad from my
mom's office—from Alyssa tacked on the wall saying something like,
"Love you! Call you later!" It's mortifying, really. But when I
caught the tail end of My Name Is Earl a couple of weeks back and saw Alyssa
Milano, I was still psyched.
Tasha
Robinson
For
me, the embarrassing thing is really that I don't do the celeb-crush thing. I
never had posters of actors or bands up on my walls, I've never gone to see a
film solely (or even largely) because of a cast member, or gone to a concert to
see some dreamboat live. I'm pretty indifferent to the charms of most of the people
who make the entertainment media all drooly. That said, now that I think about
it, I did watch The Dukes Of Hazzard far more than its repetitive plots or cornpone
humor necessarily warranted, and part of that might have been the winning
smile, tousled golden hair, and frequent unwarranted shirtlessness of John
Schneider.
(In later seasons, that unwarranted shirtlessness was cut right into the
opening credits, as if to say "Yes, this is the main reason I'm on this show.
C'mon, you know none of you want to see Tom Wopat half-naked, right?")
Nathan
Rabin
Aren't
all early celebrity crushes inherently embarrassing? Granted, there was nothing
particularly cringe-inducing about my formative crushes on Jennifer Connelly
and Susan Sarandon, but my boyhood infatuations tended to run closer to the
sleazy, sordid sexuality of Page 6 girl turned pop tart Samantha Fox. Oh, how I
longed to hang her cheesecake poster on my wall! But for me, early embarrassing
celeb crushes centered primarily on the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, the gold
standard of prepubescent spank mags. The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is such a
staple of American culture that I considered it my patriotic duty to consume it
as soon as it hit newsstands. As
a boy, I used to look forward to the arrival of the swimsuit issue the way
gentiles look forward to Christmas. Everyone had their favorite supermodel,
their fantasy girlfriend: The models featured were like the Justice League of
high-end spank material. There was the exotic Paulina Porizkova, and Stephanie
Seymour, with her phosphorescent eyes, burning intensity and Axl-beguiling
wildness, not to mention the uninhibited sexuality and all-around hotness of
Elle "The Body" Macpherson. But my personal favorite was Kathy
Ireland,
a girl-next-door type with big eyes and an even bigger rack. There was a
beguiling innocence about her. She somehow managed to convey an incongruous
wholesomeness even while posing in tiny bikinis. Wait, did I mention the boobs?
'Cause man, she had quite the pair. Today, Ireland serves as CEO of a brand product marketing
company, Kathy Ireland Worldwide, and she wrote Powerful Inspirations: Eight Lessons That Will Change
Your Life, a
Christian inspirational book. But for me, her enduring legacy will be helping
generations of hormonally overdriven young men make it through the maelstrom of
adolescence with their sanity relatively intact.