I love Jon Stewart.  I know he’s not everyone’s cup of tea (and frankly, having discussed politics with Rick himself, I am guessing Rick probably isn’t a big fan of Jon’s left leaning comedy), but I think he’s awesome.  I think the reason why I dig his comedy so much is that it comes from truth….it comes from real news stories that most people in my generation or younger would find dry.  I don’t know a lot of people who watch the nightly news these days for that very reason. And I think it is fantastic that Jon can take the news and turn it into something that I not only want to watch, but learn from and often laugh out loud at.

(Are you wondering why I’m waxing poetic about Jon Stewart on a Rick Springfield site?  Just follow along with me for another few lines of text, please.)

I’m not going to lie here.  I watched this year’s state of the union while in bed, half asleep.  In fact, I think it actually put me to sleep.  I figured I’d get the high points on the morning news the next day.   But Jon takes the speech, hits the high points and gets in his zingers as well.  I think what’s funniest about this clip is that it is so not a place where I’d expect to hear a RS reference.  And it’s not just a little mention; whomever wrote this bit is obviously a big fan, because it’s right on, to the point and unabashedly enthusiastic.

Enjoy.  The RS mention comes in at about 1:45 on the clip.

I am getting a bit lost on the way to re-reading Rick’s autobiography, have you noticed?

To be fair, since I started I’ve had a kid move home, a hurricane, two younger kids start school, a kid move out again for a job (a real job post college!  Crikey!), a husband who travels more than he’s home, a death in the family….I could go on and on.  You want an excuse as to why I’m not blogging about Rick Springfield lately?  I got a hundred of ‘em.

But I got reminded of my absolute favorite thing about being a Rick Springfield fan this past weekend. 

No, it’s not that “naked butt that a lot of women have seen” (though possibly, this could be a close second….).  It’s not his high energy shows that usually (except when there’s a lot of red wine involved) leave the crowd screaming for more.  It’s not even those songs that touch you in your heart, in your soul, and make even your skin tingle knowing that somehow, Rick just put into song and words EXACTLY the way you’ve felt at some point in your life (maybe just last week).  No, it’s not any of those things.

It’s the girlfriends.

My apologies to Rick who would probably be a little deflated to know that my favorite thing about being his fan really isn’t about him at all, but there’s the truth, mister.

This weekend I got to “meet” a friend I’ve known online for ten years at least.  Real life friends thought this was a little nuts, calling someone a friend that you’ve only ever talked to on the phone or via email/Facebook/instant message, but I am betting my Rick Springfield friends find this completely normal.  Paula and I have talked for years, and after discovering we were both parents of special needs kids, we really hit it off.  I could tell via our online interactions that we would most likely hit it off for real in person, but somehow, I always kind of hesitated….because what if?  What if the online persona doesn’t match up to the reality of real life?  And so my hesitation has meant several years of sending out messages a few times a year that amount to “one of these days we really ought to….” that never seem to culminate in reality.

But somehow the planets aligned this year and we met up in New York City this weekend.  And somehow, instantly, I felt like I’d been reunited with a long lost friend…which I kind of had, except we’d never really met (OK there was that five seconds in the autograph line six years ago, but that hardly counted). And I should have known it from the start, that it would be awesome, because it almost always is.

Because for me, when I connect with a Rick Springfield fan, there’s already so much we have in common.  For the most part, they’re probably close to my age, since we were all between 10-20ish in the 1980s.  If we like Rick, we all probably like the same types of other music.  We all have that shared history of the sad, unrequited love we felt for him.  And that means we’re probably similar personalities, because it takes a certain type of girl to throw all of your love towards a rock star instead of a bonfide boyfriend.  Lots of times it means we have a shared story of sometime Rick’s music helped “pull us through” something.

When we started to have fan internet email lists, it was like suddenly a huge sorority of girls all over the world who were Just Like Me opened up.  Sure, I didn’t click with everyone, but out of the masses I always found people I really connected with, the ones that were just like my girlfriends in real life but had the added bonus of not making faces when I got all dreamy talking about Rick Springfield…”No, NOT Bruce Springsteen, for Heaven’s sakes if I hear that one more time, I’m going to go crazy!”   Suddenly there were people who actually wanted to muse with me about whether “Inside Silvia” was a metaphor for getting to know this amazing girl or was he just talking about sex?   It was awesome.

But admittedly, since I’ve been “out of the game” for a while, I haven’t been as close with my “Rick Friends” as I used to be.  Real life and it’s demands have given my life a different focus and the time and energy I have left tends to go towards people who I can reach out and actually touch instead of those I can only connect with via a computer screen.  So I forgot, sort of.  How fun a Rick friend could be.  How great it is to take this small part of who you are, the part that hardly ever gets to have a say in your day to day life (unless you’re still one of those people who spends your whole day perusing the sites and reading the emails and message board postings…God Bless You if you are) and let it take over, even if it’s just for a day.  To be silly and frivolous and decadent and childish and gossipy.  To have a day that is all about fun and friendship and connection.

That’s the best part of being a Rick fan.  The people.  The fun, the friendships, and the laughter.

Thanks, Paula, for reminding me.

It was a warm Tuesday in early September, 2001.

I had eaten my breakfast after dispatching my eldest son off to the bus, sent my husband on his way to work. My eighteen month old daughter was still asleep in her crib and I could feel my baby, a son I knew from our recent ultrasound, poking me from time to time in my belly.

I turned on the Today show on my way to my desk. It was a routine I followed daily; I’d listen to the news while I answered as many emails as possible to Rick Springfield fans before my daughter awoke. This day there was buzz going around about Ticketmaster listing a November tour date in Columbus, Ohio. Normally I would have information posted to the rs.com website before things hit Ticketmaster, so I immediately started sending queries to Vivian, who would in turn ask Rick’s management to verify the listing for us. While I was waiting for an answer, emails from several of my local fan friends popped up, all talking about us traveling to the show together. One of the group was a woman named Marni O’Doherty from New York City; she thought maybe she could swing the date around some work related things in the area.

Behind me, on the television, I heard an urgency in the normally casual sounds of Matt Lauer and Katie Couric’s late morning banter. I glanced at the clock; 8:51 am. My eighteen month old daughter usually woke around 9 in the morning, she would be up soon. I looked back to my emails and continued typing out a response to one of the questions regarding upcoming tour dates, hoping to knock out at least five more before I heard her tell tale singsong request for release from her crib.

“We have a breaking news story,” Katie Couric said behind me from the television. “Apparently a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center. ” I stopped typing for a moment and looked over my shoulder at the TV. There they were, the two towers I remembered well from my trip to New York several years ago. One of them had a black gash near the top of it; smoke was billowing out into the wind.

I got up from my desk and walked closer to the television. “Oh my God,” I whispered in disbelief as I watched the scene unfold.

My head spun as I heard eyewitnesses recount impossible to believe details of what they were seeing and hearing that September morning. Matt and Katie speculated about what might be happening in the towers. I stood in front of the TV, unable to move. The sun was shining outside here in the suburbs of Cincinnati; looking out my window the grass was green and everything seemed quiet and serene. I blinked several times, trying to reconcile the images and the banter on the television. It just didn’t make any sense. The words “World Trade Center, New York City” filled the screen below the smoke and the towers and the chaos.

Suddenly, I flashed back to the tape cassette sent to me several years ago by Marni, the same woman from New York who we had talked of going to the Columbus show with just this morning in my email box. I’d only met Marni once, last summer in Columbus. She was quiet, and nice; smart and funny. The return address on the envelope had been from her place of employment, a financial brokerage firm. It flashed in my head like a neon sign.

2 World Trade Center.

Holy shit.

As the day unfolded and my own family slowly found their shell shocked way home, the fans on our internet list shared their own personal slice of the world while they absorbed the day’s events. My son stayed in school; my husband’s workplace went on lockdown and I distractedly amused my daughter with puzzles and dolls while I stayed glued to the television and computer.

I wasn’t the only person who remembered where Marni worked. Emails back and forth on our mailing list all day worried about her. Many, many people that were involved in our 1000+ person email list were from the New York area. Scores of them had sent emails letting everyone know that they were OK. They told stories of walking, walking north, walking over bridges. They talked of the stand still of the usually vibrant city and the horror they’d all experienced being there.

But no contact was made all day by Marni. We all knew she’d been at her desk when the tragedy occurred; she had sent an email to our mailing list before 8 am. She’d worked on the 89th floor of the second tower to be hit. All of the news anchors speculated at what floor the plane must have hit; it appeared that it must have hit below where she was.

If she had stayed in her office, she was likely above the site of impact. That evening, as I watched on TV, workers climbed from here to there in the wreckage, the darkness kept at bay by the largest floodlights I’d ever seen. I couldn’t stop thinking of Marni. Did they have televisions in their offices? Had she aware of what was going on? Had she started down the stairs? Maybe she had gotten out entirely but was in a hospital somewhere, unable to check in. Or maybe she was just fine but with a family member who wasn’t.

I didn’t know Marni well. But somehow, living so far away from the tragedy, somehow knowing that there was someone I’d touched, I’d met, I knew struggling there made it more real, more personal, more vivid, if that is at all possible. I grieved for those who knew her better: her family, her husband, her friends. Every person on the news I saw…somehow, it wasn’t an unknown stranger. It was Marni, it was someone just like Marni, maybe someone she knew personally. On that day of terrible things, knowing that someone I’d shared space with before was a part of it made all of it more. I kept wishing, kept hoping, kept thinking that somehow, we’d hear from her in the next hour. Or the next day. Or the day after that. Somehow, that would make all of this horror at least not as horrible, not as unthinkable, not as terrible.

But it was all of those things, and then some. More than three thousand times over.

Our friend Marni was never found in the wreckage. Her family and friends held a memorial for her, a few weeks after 9/11. And ten years later, Marni is still thought of, still remembered, still a touchstone.

We Miss Marni

NY Times Marni Pont O’Doherty Profile

Marni Facebook Page

Marni’s Rick Springfield Writings

So, I haven’t posted on the RS site lately.  My bad.

It’s because my dad is in town.  He lives in Florida and when he comes up, it’s a multiweek thing with a trip out to see my brother and sister in Michigan, where I grew up.  It’s been a busy few weeks, especially that 11 hour trek out to my childhood home.

I was going to write about RS but kept coming back to my dad and how he was woven in my teenage obsession with my favorite far away rock star.  I couldn’t come up with much; my parents were divorced when I was a teen, and while my father’s absence likely was a factor in my being so drawn in by the handsome Rick and his soulful tunes, he didn’t exactly factor in a lot of my RS memories.  My first RS show?  My girlfriend’s sister took us.

But when I dug back, really far back, I realized that it was my dear old dad who took me to see Hard To Hold.  Not the first time, I don’t think…I think the first time I went with my friend Dawn to the Showcase Cinemas (sadly, no longer there) in Sterling Heights.  But the second time, I think my dad was trying to find something to do together during one of our more tense teenage periods and he offered to take me to see Hard to Hold.

And if that weren’t supportive enough (because I suppose dads take their kids to the movies all of the time, but thinking back now on him suffering through that, it was kind of a big deal), a few months later, I remembered asking my dad for the VHS of the movie.  Now, again, this might not sound like much, but two factors were in play here.  Number one, it cost a LOT of money.   These days we’re used to cheap tapes and DVDs; unless you’re buying a whole TV series or something buying a movie to own forever costs between $10 and $20.  But back then?  The technology was so new that the Hard to Hold VHS tape retailed for $79.95. No lie.  And my dad isn’t exactly known for extravagant gifts. So this was a big deal.

Number two, we didn’t own a VCR.  That’s right, I asked for the video even though I didn’t own a way to watch it.  I’m crazy right?  Well no, not exactly.  I had already purchased the $59.95 Platinum Videos with babysitting money, and I would go to the county library to watch it on their cubicle VCRs.   No problem to get there on my bike.  It was only six miles away.

I rode my bike along these two very busy roads at age 13/14 to watch RS at the library. I can't remember how long it took, but Mapquest says it was 6 miles one way.

That’s right.  I was obsessed and crazy enough to ride my bike on major, busy roads six miles just to watch Rick Springfield.  Imagine when all the cubbies were full of people watching their own stuff.  That made my little jaunt that much more frustrating.  But most of the time it worked out.

My dad did indeed end up buying the VHS for me that year, and I still have it to this day.  I haven’t watched it in ages, but I just found the trailer for Hard to Hold on YouTube and it brought it all back.  Yikes.  I’m not sure I would trek twelve miles around trip in my car to see this movie these days, but back then?  It was a whole different world.

So kudos to my dad for trying to be supportive.  And also praise to the Macomb County Library, which filled in the gaps until my mom could finally spring for a VHS in my junior year of high school.  Sadly, when I was there last week I saw that the library isn’t there anymore; the area has grown and they’ve broken down into smaller satellite libraries.  But the building is still there, and as I drove by it…I remembered.  And I smiled.

Summer, 1996
Somewhere In the Midwest

“This is possibly the craziest thing we’ve ever done,” Dawn said from the passenger seat of my car as we sped down I 75 towards the Ohio border.

“Maybe, but I think it will be fun.  I mean, everyone seems very nice online.  I mean, how much trouble could a bunch of middle aged women get into?”

“Who are you calling middle aged?” Dawn laughed.

I’d taken to attending the monthly Rick Springfield chats online in the last few months.  They were held the first Tuesday of the month on AOL.  It was amazing to find out that he was actually still working, currently on a TV show called High Tide.  The time slot was terrible; it had taken me weeks to find that it aired at 12:30am on Sunday evenings in my area.  I bought some empty VHS tapes and set my VCR so I could see what Rick looked like these days.

Through the chats I’d learned that Rick actually still had an active fan club.  The one I’d belonged to back in the 80s had folded long ago, but a woman in Missouri had started a new one in 1989.  Everyone who attended the chats was a member, and there newsletters, photographs, all the trappings.  I’d chuckled at the idea at first, but it wasn’t longer than the third time I entered the chat room that I joined the club myself.   It wasn’t the idea of being a SuperFan that made me do it; it was the idea that somehow, somewhere,there were people that would just get my decades long fascination with this man.

In the first newsletter I received, there was an advertisement for a “Springfield Connection”.  Once a year, the fan club would sponsor a gathering of fans somewhere in the US, usually in a town called Springfield.   There were photos of the one held last year, held in Springfield, Massachusetts.  Women older than me spent a weekend listening to Rick’s music, watching videotaped appearances, talking about their connection to him, their experiences at his shows or when they met him.  Everyone looked happy and friendly; a girls’ weekend with a theme.

This year’s Springfield Connection was being held in Springfield, Ohio.  When I opened my atlas, I discovered that Springfield was just a few hours away, it being a suburb of Dayton.  I could easily attend.

One of the room decorations from our Springfield Connection weekend in 1996.

There were supposed to be somewhere around fifteen of us coming together in a huge hotel suite for the occasion.   One was flying in from California, a few were driving in from Missouri (including the fan club president), one was coming from Massachusetts and a few from more local areas that could arrive easily in cars, like Dawn and I.  I was kind of amazed at the level of devotion that some of these women had to seeing each other; it wasn’t like Rick himself was going to be here, but still women were paying to fly across the country to see each other.  These were professional women, all of us adults, some of us with families of our own these days, coming together to have an extended pajama party.

Dawn and I parked my car in the hotel parking lot, grabbed our bags and found the entrance for the suite.  On the door was an 80s era poster of Rick Springfield.  Dawn looked at me and rolled her eyes.  “What have we gotten ourselves into?” she asked.

I laughed.  “Hey, if it isn’t fun, at least there will be booze.”  I held up the six pack of Zimas in my left hand.

The door swung open and shouts erupted from inside.  “They’re here!”  I could hear music playing in the background as I was greeted by at least a dozen friendly faces.

Fast forward twenty four hours.

Vivian looked me square in the eye.  “Can you really do that?”

Dawn and I exchanged glances.  “Oh sure,” I answered.  “We can use some of my old memorabilia and my scanner to get images for the site.  All we have to go is go online and get some web space.  Easy peasy.”

Dawn nodded.  “Absolutely.  We’d be happy to do it, if you’re interested.”

And just like that, Dawn and I had agreed to create a website for the Rick Springfield fan club that Vivian ran.  She’d been running her club for seven years now, in the quiet days when Rick Springfield had been laying low in his career.  Somehow, she’d found a way to build the group into several hundred strong, even in the days before the internet.  Her club had swelled since she’d started the AOL chats.

But as Dawn and I discovered on our Springfield Girls Gone Wild Weekend, a weekend without much wild but much fun and karaoke style singing of RS tunes, Vivian was worried about a newly formed club that aimed to unseat hers as the Officially Endorsed By Rick Springfield fan club.  The new club had a website, something Vivian did not.   A permanent online presence was a logical step, but Vivian at age 50, was at the edge of her comfort zone just by hosting online chats and putting together her paper newsletters four times a year.

This notice was in the RLS Fan Club newsletter in the summer of 1996. The long website address was common in those days; it was very expensive to buy a real domain name. We paid $30 a month for this one as it was. Dawn tried to set up a newsgroup too, but that never took off.

Dawn and I had literally no idea how to build a website.  But we were both pretty savvy and had agreed as we crashed in our sleeping bags the night before that we could easily figure it out.  I loved the idea of revisiting my crush and helping out Vivian in the process.  She was like a warm mother figure to the rest of the much younger women in our little group.  Where we were all talking about babies and young children, she spoke of her nearly grown children and nearing retirement husband, of her aging parents.  She didn’t have the same story or background as any of us, and by the end of the weekend we were all pulling for any way to help her make her club succeed.  We loved hearing her stories of how Rick seemed surprised and grateful for her work on the club, and how surprised and grateful she was in return for his attentions.

“Well, let’s do it, then.  Everyone?”  Vivian raised her voice to get the attention of the rest of the group, who were all engaged in their own side conversations in small clusters.  “Looks like the club is going to have a website.  Our new girls here have agreed to put one together for us.”  Vivian gestured to us, smiling.

Dawn and I smiled back at the group.  I hoped that it wasn’t too hard to figure out.

**The original website went online on 7/16/96***