The lost art of the celebrity crush

Since I've been "vision questing," as a friend once described one of these pensive moods of mine, in the last week or so, one of the questions I've been asking myself is "What is love?" And then I remember the particularly odd episode of Mr. Rogers where Lady Aberlin goes around asking everybody that, and it gives me pause. But don't worry, this post isn't going to go into Hallmark card territory. As I've been thinking back over my happiest and most romantic memories, one thing has become clear: most of them involve eminently unsuitable people who never knew that I existed. And so I have been pondering the lost art of the celebrity crush.

My childhood and adolescence were filled with mad longings for athletes (I preferred jockeys), actors (Paul Darrow of Blake's 7 made me weak in the knees), and even cartoon characters (Bugs Bunny was my first boyfriend). When I got to college, I branched off into the almost-attainable "big man on campus" crush. I longed for Chuck Klosterman long before anyone outside of UND had ever heard of him. (If you're reading this, Chucky, call me!) And of course there were all the celebrity professors as well. (Between swooning over Dr. Beard and Dr. Huang, it's a wonder I ever got any homework completed at all!)

But it seems that around the same time our society became obsessed with stalkers (I could write a whole separate post about that and might do so one day soon), the celebrity crush became a no-no. Oh, sure enough, you might hear a college girl today murmur that Patrick Dempsey is "hot," but I'm sure that she will no longer be the proud possessor of a scrapbook filled with articles about him and a wall covered with his pictures. Because in today's anti-stalker culture, that would seem seriously weird. Plus, when such things are always attainable online at the touch of a button, they probably seem less valuable and not as precious as they once did.

But I've been thinking about all the good things that my celebrity crushes have given me.

First of all, they gave me a drive to research. My first research project in the microfilm room at UND had nothing to do with school at all. Instead, I was looking up every article I could find (thanks to the green-bound Reader's Guide) about Sylvester Stallone in the first year he became famous after writing Rocky. Sure, it seems kind of dumb now, but I really did learn how to do thorough, complete research in a way that a project on plate tectonics would never have inspired me to. Likewise, I didn't become an authority on the Bee Gees because I was intellectually stimulated by their music (although that did come in time); it was because I wanted to know everything Robin Gibb had ever said or thought or done.

More importantly, I think that my celebrity crushes have helped me to practice the whole business of being in love in a safe way before branching off into real boys, who can be easily hurt by careless blunders. I wonder how teenagers today accomplish this, or if they do it at all. From the male-female interactions I witness on campus every day, I'm thinking they don't. (I also wonder how they learn to call the opposite sex on the phone in these days of Caller ID, since it used to involve dialing your beloved's number repeatedly and then hanging up, and that no longer seems possible.)

At any rate, these memories have been such fond ones for me that I've decided to buck the trend and find a new celebrity to crush on. You can ask me who it is, but I'll just blush and look at the floor, so don't bother!