I think I love you

Rolling Stone May 2012

David Cassidy. What a babe!

I never missed a Friday night watching The Partridge Family. The line-up was something like Nanny and the Professor, The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, something else I think, and then Love American Style. It was a Friday night of heaven.

And nothing was more heavenly than Keith Partridge. I don't think that I even knew what a man could be, but, oh, I squirmed whenever the time would come to watch the show.

I wasn't a Jan or Marcia Brady girl. No, I wanted to be Laurie Partridge. I wanted to play the keyboards and sing back-up to Keith. I wanted to wear the cool velveteen jackets, and have the long swinging hair, and sort of be so cool that I was in the band with him. Of course, I imagine, that in my adolescent imaginings, I wasn't Keith's sister. I was the cool chick from next store, so that when he looked over at me with his twinkling eyes, I could, I would, know that later, after the show, we'd make out. Jeez, kind of like Paul and Linda McCartney ... never thought of that before. And she, Linda or Laurie, couldn't really play, and she definitely couldn't sing. I could do that for sure!

I was so ... dorky that I even had some of the girls from my Girl Scout troop perform a skit of the Partridge Family at a spaghetti dinner we hosted. Say what?! Oh yeah, I put the record on and we lip synced to "I Think I Love You.' Of course, I didn't get to play Keith or Laurie. I played dorky Danny ... I had the red hair and thought that it would be more authentic if I took the role. Of course my bass guitar was cut out of a cardboard box, but I had the red hair.

One of the worst things that ever happened to me, happened on a family vacation to Michigan. My grandfather had a cottage on a small resort lake, and we would go up to visit. Sometimes we would fish off of the end of the pier ... catch little sunfishes and the like. We rarely caught anything and we more or less just played at it. The boy who lived in the cottage next door was a little older, and very naughty. He had a rough edge to him that was sort of ... interesting. He must have been bored to be hanging around my sisters and I. He showed us a little pail of fish that he had caught from the lake. We were impressed. While we were showing interest in his catch, he tacked one of the fish up on his dart board that was hung on a tree near the cottages. He moved back and started throwing darts at the fish. You can imagine what that looked like. Yuck! But we all stood there and watched him. Then, liking the attention, and wanting more ... he grabbed one of my teen magazines, tore out a double page poster of my beloved David, tacked it on the dart board, threw another fish up there, and before I could stop him, he darted fish guts all over my man! It was agony! It was a big deal those magazines. I had to rub a lot of sheckles together to come up with the cash to buy them ... and he ruined it! Ah, but I got him. Later that day, he was standing on the end of the pier fully clothed. I mean, this guy had on Wranglers, and a shirt, and a belt with a big belt buckle, and boots. And what did I do? I ran down the pier as fast as I could and I pushed him into the water! That's what you get for defying my David Cassidy poster, dum ass.

A few years ago, my sister and I took my mom out for a Mother's Day adventure. We ended up at a new agey boutique, and they were offering palm readings. We paid for my mom to have her's read. We could hear everything that was going on, and because she's my mother, she wandered from the reading to a conversation. I could hear her say that maybe I wasn't married because I was stuck on handsome. I've thought a lot about that since then ... and I think that she may have been on to something. Or maybe it is that the first boy I had a crush on was David Cassidy. I bought every album that he ever made. And the thing about him, he could sing ... and he sang to me. I've not kept up with him. I don't dare. I want him frozen in that time. When I saw this in Rolling Stone, I thought perfect ... just as I remember him. And the excerpt from the interview? oh he was a bad boy. Ah. No wonder I loved him. I like a good looking man, who is a little bad.

Maybe that's why I wasn't so mad at the boy who darted fish guts all over my poster. And maybe I pushed him in the water because I just wanted to get my hands on him. And him I could. David was too far away from my world for me to do it to.