
photo New York Times

Click your heels together, Dorothy (behind your ears)
Poet's Eye Winks
for release Halloween 2005
Washington D. C.
Have you ever had a crush on someone who is completely out of reach? A movie actor or a rock-star? A model or a millionaire? Is there a woman out there who hasn't had a secret fantasy affair with Cary Grant or Brad Pitt or Mick Jagger? At least Woody Allen. My first fantasy crush when I was pre-pubescent was Snow White. She was just so perfect and beautiful and kind. I wanted to be a dwarf, preferably Dopey.
Then there was that gorgeous second grade teacher I fell in love with as a first grader. She was so perfect and freckled on the playground in her yellow Doris Day dress. I wasn't even in her class. She was impossible. Then when I was about ten, I thought it would be nice to be on a Ferris wheel with Haley Mills. When I was twelve I nearly hopped a plane to Hawaii to chase Deborah Walley's incarnation of Gidget. Impossible.
By the time I was a teenager I was falling in love every time I saw a Shirley McClain movie. In high school I discovered that the most fascinating girls were not the ones who were simply pretty, but the ones who were smart as well. At some point you have to talk. I started looking for the ones with glasses. There's nothing quite so sexy as a pair of secretarial glasses on the face of a beautiful woman....even a marginally beautiful woman. When Dorothy Parker said that "men don't make passes at girls who wear glasses," she hadn't met me.
This brings us to one of my latest impossible crushes, Maureen Dowd. I know that Arianna is going to take this hard, but when I read Maureen's writing or see her crossing her legs on Chris Mathews or Meet the Press and talking in that enticingly intimate voice, I get all gooshey. How sexy can a woman be? Beautiful, sly, minxlike, cunning, smart.....and impossible.
We love to dream the impossible dream. We love to vacation from our work-a-day lives with fantasies of queens and knights and Gatsby and long beaches at night with susserating waves or the clinking of glasses in a fine restaurant atop some spinning tower gazing into the elegant eyes of our witty and beautiful paramours while we exchange bon mots. We all have fleeting remembrances or fantasies of being Katie Holmes or Tom Cruise in an ecstasy of pre-nuptial bliss on the Eiffel Tower.
The truth is that I'm still on the rebound from my crush on Lisa Simpson. She has been my dream woman for years. She's so perfectly idealistic and also smart and resourceful and pure of heart and.....impossible. The perfect woman.
This is why fantasy lovers have it all over real lovers. They are distant and chaste and impossible. Real lovers are present and human and flawed. With real lovers, you have to put the cap back on the toothpaste and endure snoring, farts, burps and morning breath. Real life is the enemy of fantasy.
But let me have this fantasy. I walk into a little bistro somewhere around Capitol Hill and see Maureen Dowd sitting at the bar in a slinky black dress and a pair of red high heels nursing a vodka and tonic and looking pensive. I would slide in on the next stool and say something banal like, "where do I know you from? Ah yes, you are Mareen Dowd. I faithfully read your column."
And she would say, "And you are Lightning Rod, I faithfully read yours."
Ah, we can dream, can't we?
Dear Mr. Gable,
I am writing this to you
and I hope that you will read it so you'll know
My heart beats like a hammer
and I stutter and I stammer
every time I see you at the picture show.
I guess I'm just another fan of yours
and I thought I'd write and tell you so.
---Judy Garland singing to Clark Gable, Broadway Melody of 1938
Who is your crush? Maybe you can find them on Halloween.