30 Day Blog Challenge Day 9: My First Celebrity Crush

This is day 9 of my blog challenge. I've really enjoyed this so far. I hope you guys have too. Today, my assignment is to talk about my first celebrity crush. I had a hard time figuring out who was actually my first because I really had two major celebrity crushes when I was younger: Linda Ronstadt and Farrah Fawcett. So I had to do a little digging to figure out when each one of them would have been. Turns out that, based on when they hit the height of their celebrity, my first has to have been Linda Ronstadt.

Carl Lender [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)
or CC-BY-SA-3.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)],
via Wikimedia Commons

Now, to be fair, I didn't have a poster of Ms. Ronstadt over my bed like I did Farrah Fawcett, but I did have lots of her albums (truth out--they were my brother's albums) to stare at for hours while I listened to her angelic voice. By far my favorite song of hers was "Blue Bayou," a cover of the Roy Orbison hit. While Orbison's version is obviously remarkable, Ronstadt adds a soulful sexiness to the song that Orbison just couldn't accomplish. That might be attributable to the fact that I at no time was madly in love with Roy Orbison.

In addition to listening to every song of hers we owned, I greedily took in Casey Kasem's American Top 40 every Saturday morning in the hopes that one of her songs would be there. If she was in a magazine, I read it. I remember being so angry at her when I read that she got married to Jerry Brown. It wasn't that I thought she should marry me. I just really didn't like him. And if she was on TV, I was camped in front of the set. I remember getting in trouble one night when we were watching and old movie entitled FM. I didn't care about the movie even a little bit, but I heard that there was going to be footage from one of her concerts. So the whole family was gathered around the only color TV in the house (I really wanted to be alone with Linda, but I wasn't going to make do with my 12-inch black-and-white set, so I settled for sharing her with everyone else) watching the movie. Everyone seemed to be pretty quiet right up until it became clear that the concert was coming up, when suddenly, my little nephew Stevie decided it was time to start chattering about anything and nothing. I politely asked him if he would please consider being a little more quiet. Yeah, that's a lie. I screamed at him to shut up so I could hear. That didn't go over too well. Luckily, the scolding didn't take up the whole concert scene.

I continue to love every song she sings. As a teacher of seniors, I do a goodbye presentation for my kids every year and the first song on the soundtrack is her "Goodbye My Friend." It's guaranteed to draw a tear from the grumpiest soul. I'm really sad to have read that she suffers from Parkinson's Disease that has become so advanced that she is no longer able to sing. A glorious voice of my generation silenced.

I thought I'd end by sharing a video of her singing my favorite song: