My first celebrity crush was Shaun Cassidy. He of the feathered blonde hair and Hardy Boy fame. I clearly remember getting his record for Christmas when I was about six. There is a photo of me holding up the cover with the HUGE picture of his face next to my tiny pleased one. He was dreamy.
But my puppy love for Shaun Cassidy had fallen to the wayside by the time Rick Springfield came on the scene in 1981. What was so great about Rick was that you could listen to his music and see him everyday on General Hospital. I had a roommate once who claimed to be a RS fan but wasn’t “into soaps” which to me defeats the entire point of loving Rick Springfield in the early 80’s!! Dr. Drake was there each day in his white lab coat with the collar turned up saving people and bedding nurses with perfectly feathered hair. Always with the feathered hair! Then at 4 o’clock the record player was ON.
Rick is still touring and recording and even shows up in GH occassionally playing Noah Drake and some rock star doppelganger in a plotline too stupid even for me to follow. In 2001 I was in Las Vegas for a birthday bash and we saw Rick in some sort of Vegas-y show in which he performed for an audience of women in their 30’s and 40’s and their husbands who sat with their arms crossed looking less than amused. It was a lot of fun (especially since we didn’t have husbands there ruining our Rick buzz. And we could drink alcohol which was, obviously not allowed when we were 8 year old fangirls)
I saw him again a few years ago at Mohegan Sun and it was really a great show. He did this bit where he went out into the audience and got up on chairs and played and the women on the floor went batshit insane. I mean CRAZY hysterics. Again the husbands were like “who IS this woman??” In the bathroom later I overheard mature, married mothers with jobs and degrees and mortgages squealing “I touched his thigh!!” like 14 year old girls. It was awesome.
Last night I discovered Rick does one of those celebrity cruise things for his fans. I love that he has old GH castmates on it (I see you Bobbie Spencer – you with your faking blindness so Noah wouldn’t leave you!), and Doug Davidson of Young and the Restless who I remember from reading Tiger Beat 50 million years ago, has been Rick’s best friend forever. I particularly love that on the upcoming cruise Rick will be peforming Working Class Dog in ITS ENTIRETY which would make the whole thing worthwhile IMO. Who doesn’t love “Jessie’s Girl”??!
From the looks of this, Rick spends a lot of the cruise shirtless and drunk which as an adult I find amusing, but when I was a kid I would have been horrified.
she liked Imaginary Men best of all 