Popshifter‘s Secret Garden of Crushes

By Less Lee Moore

Pizzazz of The Misfits

WFMU’s Beware of the Blog is a fabulous resource for discovering music, movies, and art that I would likely never know about if left to my own devices. Sometimes, however, my favorite blog entries are the first-hand accounts of the often-perverting effects of pop culture.

In April, Pseu Braun’s “My Secret Garden (the weird alienated one)” described how her childhood crushes were quite different from those of other girls her age:

As early as the age of four back in the late sixties/early seventies my preoccupation with and crushes on celebrities were a mental tsunami drowning the village of my own potential. Worse was the fact that my crushes were on personalities so incredibly unsexy to other young girls who dreamt about the classic version of Prince Charming that I could not even share during girltalk, leaving me left out of that whole female bonding thing.

In between my attempts to keep coffee from spraying through my nose while reading this amazing and insightful piece, I began to feel a lot less alone in my own history of strange crushes. This isn’t to say that I didn’t have the typical early/mid-eighties crushes on pop stars like Duran Duran, Adam Ant, Billy Idol, and the like (although it did get a bit weird in my teens when I developed unhealthy fixations with Stiv Bators and Dave Vanian).

Apparently, other Popshifter writers were not immune to such weird crushes. Megashaun explains that he had a crush on what WFMU reader Bronwyn calls Not-Even-Real-Characters: Pizzazz from The Misfits (in the Jem cartoon, not to be confused with Danzig’s band).

Perhaps the most bizarre past crush story comes from Dan Benton:

My ex wife told me she was once in love with Thomas Jefferson. It totally sounds like I’m making this up, or that she was, but she showed me a book where she’d written “I love you Thomas Jefferson. Big strong man” as a little girl.

Popshifter readers have admitted some of their own secrets, as well. Cake writes, “Okay, I’ll ‘fess. . . ancient footballer Johnny Unitas and Charlie Chaplin. For a start. Dang and how could I forget poor old Anthony Perkins!” LaTanya tells us that she had it bad for Alex P. Keaton (Michael J. Fox) from Family Ties. “It was the suit and briefcase, baby!! Oh, yeah, and I had the hots for his pops! Mr. Keaton was hot, liberal sex and I knew it then!”

Johnny Unitas

I’ve put together some thoughts on my earliest, weirdest crushes and gathered more from other Popshifter writers.

Read about more Weird Crushes. . .

The Key Word is “Goofy,” by Less Lee Moore

Andrea, Lynda, Margot, and Erin, by Christian Lipski

From Jesus to Micky Dolenz, by Michelle Patterson

Crush Encounters of the Pre-Pubescent Kind, by Ann Clarke