Rick Revisited

In honor of Rick Astley's birthday, I've posted my essay about him called "Rick Revisited". So pull on your leg warmers, snap in that banana hair clip and Roger Rabbit down memory lane with me:

Everyday, lost love is rediscovered in the oddest of places. Sometimes, it’s sitting next to you on the red-eye into Philadelphia. Someone’s bumping into it right now in the frozen food aisle at Safeway. I rediscovered my very first love I had at thirteen years old last week on eBay. I bought his video hits collection and, today, finally got it in the mail. Rick Astley, along with the hairy Turkish man who sold vegetables and rock candy out of a beat up Toyota, form the epicenter of my childhood. Watching these low-budget music videos has prompted me to express what I never could before, certain humiliation be damned.
I spent four years carrying a torch for Rick Astley. It was a constant bone of contention for my family and clergy. School assignments and term papers were signed “Keisha Astley”. I swore to anyone who would listen that Rick and I were man and wife. I’d committed his birthday and the birthdays of his immediate family to memory. Ditto with the cassette tapes liner notes. Elaborate plans to meet him were laid in excruciating detail. Friends often reminded me of our ten years, four months and eight day age difference, but shrugged it off. Age was but a number and me? Cunning and mature beyond my thirteen years, thank you very much.
Rick set the standard for what was to become “my type” (that is, the clean-shaven crooner. The brooding, emaciated rocker came later). His soulful voice did things to me that nowadays require the aid of “AA” batteries. His wobbly leg-shaking boogie was just the right side of sexy. For a preteen crush, he was safe, practically sexless and quite debonair. Before the 90s, he was rarely seen without a suit. Always versatile, he could switch between the predictable shirt and tie to the less formal mock turtleneck and trench coat combo. But in the end, it was all about the red pompadour.
His music provided the soundtrack to my puberty. When he sang “Take me to your Heart”, I imagined him singing to a subdued crowd and making eyes at me in a smoky bar. In my daydreams, he would speak his lyrics in a poetic, climax-of- a-Hugh-Grant-movie sort of way. My favorite song was “It would take a Strong, Strong Man”. This ballad was a complete and welcome departure from anything else Stock-Aitken-Waterman was feeding him at the time. Although it was the junior prom song of 1988, true enjoyment was purely private. Lying on my bed in the dark, I listening to and rewound that song all night. How I wished he lived next door so we could exchange witty, double entendre over a round of UNO! The night would eventually end, but not without a kiss (insert loving sigh here) before he escaped through my open bedroom window. We were meant to be and it was only a matter of time before we were together forever.
I came close twice (actually, “close” is stretching it, but in love, distance is of no consequence). The first time, my parents had decided to take a trip to London. “Eureka!” I thought. “Victory is mine!” Employing seventh grade logic, I figured I could slip away (320 kilometers away, to be exact) to Manchester while the parents were sightseeing. After my train arrived in Manchester, all I would have to do was hitchhike to Newton-Le-Willows. I would present myself at Rick’s doorstep, he’d take one look at me and insist we become one. White doves would take flight; violins would sing, we’d have a litter of babies, et cetera, et cetera. Never mind that I was stuck at Ludwigsburg Middle School until the summer or that my evil parents were hip to the plan from the very beginning. In the end, instead of finding true love in a quaint English town, I spent a week with aunt Patricia, a loathsome crone bent on blanketing the globe with a thin layer of second hand smoke. For seven long days, I sent out desperate, telepathic distress signals to my future husband.
My second chance arrived on May 8, 1988. My dad bought me tickets to see my man at the Stuttgart Scheyerhalle. I later found out that he bribed my sister with fifty Deutsch Marks so he would be spared of the experience. I donned my best outfit with matching hair scrunchie and off we taxied toward my destiny. Turns out, our seats were so far up, we may as well have been in Belgium. An anonymous angel lent me his binoculars for the night after explaining to him that that was my husband onstage. My mortified sister disappeared soon after and Rick and I were alone at last. I watched him do the wobbly dance and squealed with delight whenever he glanced into the rafters. Following the show, I found my sister and begged twenty marks off her for a souvenir shirt. I wore that shirt the following day and every day for at least half a year. When my mom finally forbid its public wear, I continued to sleep in it. The shirt literally disintegrated in 1993, but the remaining scraps are still in a British Knights shoebox at my mom’s house.
The music from his two post-teen idol CDs was solid, but Rick belongs to my childhood. Last I’d heard, he’d turned himself into a real person complete with wife, kids and pet. What a loss. Nevertheless, those first feelings were resurrected with this video collection. I popped in the DVD and bopped around the house. By “It Would Take a Strong, Strong Man,” I found myself laughing and crying all at once. Maybe I was crying for the deluded little girl who swore she’d marry Rick Astley. Or maybe I was laughing at the loser woman who still plans to visit Newton-Le-Willows someday.