A Boy's Dreams - 1977

I just caught a news story from the web and a video clip from an ABC news magazine program about former teen star Leif Garrett and his recent troubles with the law over his drug addictions.

The video clip showed him on stage singing his sickeningly catchy hit, "I Was Made For Dancing." That clip and his "Tiger Beat" photos brought back a rush of memories of standing in the magazine aisle of the local grocery store while my mother shopped, and looking at all of the magazines aimed at teens. In my day, in addition to Garrett, it was Donny Osmond, Michael Jackson and Shaun Cassidy, to name a few who were within a few years of my age, all of whose photos were plastered on the cheap print in a way most enticing to hormone-flooded teen girls.

Oh! How I wanted to be a teenage heart-throb! I hated those boys for their good looks, supposed talent, and their unfathomably good luck to have been born in the track they found themselves in that made them so irresistible to the very girls who were unaware of - or didn't care about - my existence. Why couldn't I have been blessed with the physical features of Paul-Michael Glaser? Why couldn't I have been bestowed with the physical coordination (and the looks!) of John Travolta? Why wasn't I gifted with a voice (and the looks!) like Shaun Cassidy? Instead, I couldn't run more than ten steps without tripping or colliding with something. When I sang, various game animals emerged from the forest with propagation of their species on their minds. My eyebrows were in the early stages of meeting and my hair didn't lay on my head the same way twice.

So, today, nearly 30 years later, I've stopped running all together, I only sing in the car...with the windows up... I discovered electrolysis and, more recently, waxing, and my hair has quite decidedly left my head for the apparently less hostile climate of my back.

And I look at the sorry mug shot of Leif Garrett, who is now being forced into drug rehab by a judge, and I wonder if, had his gifts been bestowed upon me, and everything I could have ever wanted as a young, teenage heart-throb was laid at my feet, would I just be in Garrett's situation today, looking across the court room at some anonymous shlub with a job and a wife and a kid or two, and wondering what it would have been like - wishing, even - to have had the childhood, the life, of a faceless nobody with his head screwed on straight?


dassall!