Magic is a Time and Not a Place and Can’t Tell the Salt from the Wound and In Hopes that He May Peak Again and Cowards Stay and Face the Consequences. Among the titles/notes/drafts on my computer desktop are: I jot down ideas for columns all the time. Read this only if you want a better understanding of how my mind works, how my writing process works, or if you really, really want to learn more about how shy I am around women. That’s not older than dirt, but it’s older than a lot of trees. I just realized I’m older now than Kitty Carlisle was when I talked with her on a block of wood. Or because I dreamed of growing up and getting older.īut not this old. Or because television didn’t have elementary-school girls as actresses in the mid-sixties. Unfortunately, my desire to be honest has overcome that urge, and I’ll confess I was never attracted to TV girls, perhaps because I had so many classmates prepared to reject me. Since I’m going down in years, beginning with a woman my grandmother’s age, then one my mother’s, the writer in me would like to finish this piece by revealing I had a celebrity crush as a boy on a girl my own age. Hard to believe no little girl developed a crush on a boy who was in love with a woman his mother’s age. Even 10 years later, when her speech patterns were being mocked on Saturday Night Live, and I had real-life girlfriends, I still defended Barbara. You may not know this, but at one time the morning Today news show starred Hugh Downs, Joe Garagiola and the love of my elementary-school life, Barbara Walters, the intelligent newscaster and interviewer who stole my heart.īorn in 1929, Barbara looked into the camera and smiled at me as I ate my before-school Cheerios each morning. Oh, and even stranger, according to everyone to whom I’ve ever revealed this. Shortly after this, I developed a stronger, more lasting and, slightly, more age-appropriate celebrity crush. Hard to believe no little girl developed a crush on a boy who was in love with a woman his grandmother’s age. The memory does not include audio, so I have no idea what I was saying to an old lady who, before I discovered her had been in Marx Brothers movies, although the smart money would be on protestations of love. One of many strange memories of my childhood is pretending a block of wood was a walkie-talkie and that I was communicating with Kitty. She was also in her mid-fifties when she captured my heart. Suffice to say, to little Keith she was the height of sophistication and elegance. (Not to disappoint, but in the previous sentence “starred on television” could also be written as “was a panelist on a game show.”) My first crush was on Kitty Carlisle, a regular on a To Tell the Truth, a program that would take longer to explain than I have space. Although I’ve been in therapy for years, I’ve yet to uncover the reasons for my attraction to that first crush, except that she starred on television. My first real crush came when I was six and I fell hard for an older woman. Like my behavior, these attractions were strange and inexplicable. Instead, in addition to unuttered real-life crushes on girls in my elementary-school classes (hello Beth Austin and Tracey Thompson), I developed serious celebrity crushes. Still, I would have enjoyed one girl having a crush on me. To be fair to all the girls I knew, I was always the shortest boy in class, but made up for it by being loud, disruptive and, although I was occasionally amusing, offensive, having been gifted with an EZ-Flow oral filter at birth, so that “unuttered thought” was an oxymoron to me. Unfortunately for me, I was exclusively a generator and never the recipient.
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