Unlikely Crushes

A few days ago, my wife Kim was running my stepdaughter to her guitar lesson at the Old Town School of Folk Music, near our home, when she spotted actor/musician Jeff Daniels parking his own tour bus (apparently he's also a musician). She confessed to thinking he was a hunk, diplomatically claiming she found me hunkier (that's all right dear-- I've seen him in Gettysburg-- I could never grow a mustache like that), but I can't blame her-- he's a good-looking, smart guy who's been in many of my favorite movies-- Something Wild, Gettysburg and even, improbably, RV, a Yen family favorite.

One of my favorite bloggers, Kristi, has posted about unusual crushes a couple of times. My favorite of hers is Michael Chiklis

I was thinking about some of my celebrity crushes over the years, and it occurred to me that some of them were a little unconventional. I remember watching Diana Rigg in The Avengers on my family's big old black and white Zenith television when I was 6 or 7 and having feelings I really wouldn't understand until 7 or 8 years later, when I was a teenager. It must have been those leather slacks-- I had similar feelings toward Julie Newmar and Eartha Kitt in their Catwoman get-ups on the Batman show.

On the opposite end, though, my most unusual childhood celebrity crush was Jane Goodall-- yes, that Jane Goodall. The one that worked with the chimpanzees.

I grew up in what we educators call a "literature-rich environment." My parents bought us encyclopedias before we could read. They subscribed to newspapers, Time Magazine (back then Time was not just a big fluff piece), Reader's Digest-- and National Geographic magazines and books. Jane Goodall made frequent appearances in those. She had pretty eyes and blonde hair and just exuded intelligence. I just thought she was a fox. While the other boys were looking for the pictures of the topless African and South American native women, I was gazing at my beloved Jane.

Smart, blonde and older than me... hmmmmm. Maybe that explains my crush on Geraldine Ferraro in the eighties...