Except this was a 20,000 person amphitheater.  There was no way anyone could get to the tour bus, hidden safely away in the no man’s land behind security.  And the gaggle of much older teen girls, with bigger breasts and more eye makeup, was a lost cause.

I hung my hope on the next day.

My girlfriend and I had ingeniously figured out which hotel Rick and his band were staying at.  I thought, at the time, we were insanely clever.  We’d called around to all of the high end hotels in the area asking for his tour manager.  Not Rick; we knew he wouldn’t stay under his real name.  Not even the band.  But the manager?  Sure enough, the Somerset Inn offered to connect me to Mr. Dana Miller’s room when I asked to speak to him.  Were they kidding?  Didn’t I sound 14 on the phone?  No matter.  They connected me and all of a sudden, he answered.

Shit!

I looked up at my friend, sitting next to me, waiting.  I was shaking. “He answered!” I mouthed. I was sure I’d be leaving a message and didn’t really expect to actually speak to him.  She nodded, pushing me forward.  I read the script.  It sounded rehearsed, and flat, but I got it out.

“Really? That sounds interesting. Sure, you can come by the hotel.   Absolutely.”

I couldn’t believe my luck!  He was ASKING me to stop by the hotel. Incredible!

“Thank you so much Mr. Miller. I’ll be by later this morning.”  I hung up the phone, it clattering from my shaky hands as I placed it in its cradle.

Oh my goodness!

An hour later, we were standing in the lobby of the hotel.  This couldn’t be right.  I expected something grand, ornate.  This lobby was tiny and minimalist, with a few chairs and one smallish desk in the corner.  I hesitated.  I didn’t know what to do next.

I looked over at my girlfriend for direction. In that time, about ten seconds, a beefy man in a blue blazer came up to us and asked us our business at the hotel. We told him about our previous conversation with Rick’s tour manager, and I showed him the blue box that we had brought to discuss with him.

“No problem. We’ll be happy to deliver this to him,” the man told us, reaching for the box.

“But Mr. Miller asked us to come. He asked us to meet with him personally. Can you at least call his room and ask him if he’d come down?” I gave him my best “please help me I am just a young girl who has a big crush on a rock star” look.

“Sorry. This is the best I can do for you. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure they get it.”

This was not turning out the way I’d planned.  My heart, which had been high in my throat the whole way over, dropped.  I could feel it descending, and my face glowed red with embarrassment and frustration.

I handed the box over. It was clear we weren’t going to be allowed to wait around in the lobby, use a house phone, or anything else.  The beefy man nodded, silently, tucking my precious gift behind the desk, out of sight.  He looked beyond us then, and his message was clear.  There’s nothing else for you here.  It’s time to leave.

My shoulders hunched over as I walked back out the sleek glass doors of the hotel.  It was one of those moments that you remember; the ones that change who you are, just a little.

Or maybe more than a little.

(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.

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.

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

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.

“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***

I had insanely high hopes for my first Rick Springfield concert. I had zero idea of what to expect standing in a venue along with 20,000 other fans, but I was pretty sure that Rick would sense that his kindred spirit had somehow arrived on the scene (despite a: being 21 years his junior, b: him being off and on with someone I’d read about in People Magazine named Barbara and c: me being a minor) and that light would appear from above and suddenly we would connect on a very spiritual level.

No, I’m not exaggerating.

We entered the gargantuan amphitheater, which was miles wide (or so it seemed). A huge area ringed the seats for lawn seating, and blankets were being set up in the areas with the best sight views. The lawn was impossibly far away from the stage, I thought, why would anyone even bother? But there were hundreds of people already staking out their spots near the edges. Hm.

There were even more seats than I had imagined in my minds eye trying to prepare myself for the concert. My heart sank. How would he ever find me with so many people here? The rows started at ZZ, meaning 52nd row (26 plus 26). I lightened; Row M couldn’t possibly be all that bad, then. We descended down the ramp towards our seats. Lower, lower, and lower. The security stopped us often to make sure that we were in an area we had tickets to be in; if you had seats in the nether regions, you weren’t even allowed closer to the stage.

Finally, we arrived at Row M. It was close in comparision to the many rows behind us. Still, I thought, thirteenth row in a place this large was still miles away from the stage. However, our seats were right on the center aisle. The sight line was fantastic. Even if someone tall stood up in front of me, I could inch out into the aisle to get a better view.

I bought a tour program that night and still have it to this day. I scanned it for photos for the first rs.net website in 1996.

The wait seemed interminable. But finally, the lights started going down and the pulsating sounds of electric guitars and synthesizers heralded the arrival of the man we’d all been waiting for. I slowly turned my gaze behind me; the crowd was quivering, and immense. I’d never seen so many people in one place in all of my life.

I closed my eyes for a second, and waited for the world to change.

Rick played all of the hits that the crowd wanted him to that night: Affair of the Heart, Living In Oz, Souls, Human Touch, Don’t Talk To Strangers, even Love is Alright Tonite and Jessie’s Girl. But as the songs played on, and I stood staring in awe at the man I’d idolized, I found myself…descending.

I should have been happy. I should have been dancing and singing and enjoying the live music and the show. The show was intense, Rick hardly stopping to speak to the crowd, just going song after song and looking beautiful. I could see him clearly from my spot in the thirteenth row, right there on the aisle, an empty expanse of space right between from him to me. This was my first rock concert, and I was sharing it with my best friend. We were in great seats in a great venue.

I’d thought that once I was in the same space as Rick that he would somehow find me in the crowd. He’d be drawn to me somehow, that fate would somehow show him the way to me in the crowd. I know that sounds like absolute insanity now, but when you’re fourteen years old, that kind of thing seems possible and real to you. As the songs played on and I realized that Rick was never going to venture out into the crowd, was never going to even realize I existed, that I was there in the same place and time as him, I started to hate the show. I hated the vapid girls that were crowding past me to get closer for the encore. I hated the fact that there were thousands of people just like me here. I wasn’t special. I wasn’t unique. He was never going to find me. He was never going to know I existed. There was nothing here. Nothing special. Nothing that made me separate from the rest of the girls here.

Of all the RS shows I’ve been to since then, my first one was the one I enjoyed the least.  Isn’t that messed up?

Me, I didn’t see it that way.  Even though these days I’m rather shocked when I listen to the lyrics of some of my favorite songs from back then, the videos for them were generally pretty clean and always seemed to tell a story.  Back in those days MTV just ran music videos all day long; there weren’t any of those crazy shows on then taking up hours of valuable time away from valuable video watching.

I took this shot of the TV one Friday Night with my Polaroid camera. Hello, 1980s.

My friend Dawn and I started hanging out at her place on Friday nights to watch videos instead.  We liked our MTV, but we discovered that the Atlanta station WTBS broadcast a show called Friday Night Videos.  It was like MTV on a regular station, and they ran videos from 8pm until the wee hours…four or five in the morning.  And the great news for us was, her parents had started going up North on Friday nights overnight, leaving us two eighth grade girls home alone.   I’m not sure if my mother realized that so many of my sleepovers at Dawn’s house were completely unsupervised; we certainly didn’t advertise it.  Other kids might have taken advantage of the lack of supervision, but the worst thing we did was generally raid her father’s half dollar collection to get a few small pizzas delivered.

Our rule was simple; we’d stay up until we’d seen Rick Springfield.  He was so popular in those days, it was a sure thing that you’d see one of his videos at some point in the six or seven hours we’d stay up watching.  We’d eat our pizzas and keep talking and writing and commenting on the music videos we saw.  Neither of us liked Yes or the Cars videos, even though the music wasn’t bad.  We both thought Cyndi Lauper was weird.  Neither of us were too impressed with Duran Duran even though everyone seemed to be so crazy for them.  We both liked Prince.

And we’d stay up that way until the wee hours of the morning, most Friday nights, just talking to each other and understanding each other.  At some point we’d hear the car door slam, the iconic opening of Rick Springfield’s “Souls” video (my favorite), or the familiar 1, 4, 5 chord sequence that opened up “Jessie’s Girl” and we ‘d move close to the tiny (by today’s standards) black and white screen.  We’d both ooh and ah over the video, what did it all mean (do you see the writing on the brick wall back there?  What does it say?), talk about how one day we’d finally meet Rick and his band and he’d see in us the kindred spirits of like souls.  But mostly, we would enjoy the calm and peace that came from both of us escaping from the real problems that were all around us, and the comfort that came in not doing so alone.

For fifteen years this site has tried to be many things to many people, for many reasons. I used to pride myself on getting out the Rick Springfield news quickly and accurately, answering emails and updating sites objectively and (at least I thought so at the time) professionally. But my perspective is definitely in the rear view mirror these days, things are taking on a different feel. No one needs another site to check Rick’s tour dates, the latest news or to find another concert photograph. There’s no reason for this site to compete with those sites. I guess what I am saying is that this site isn’t for you any more. No, this one I think is for me.

So if you’re landing here wondering where the site you were used to is, I’ll tell you. This is a new site, still a Rick Springfield fan site, but it’s also the story of him told through my eyes. I’m going to put back some of the things that used to be on www.rickspringfield.com and www.rickspringfield.net…things that should be archived somewhere. But there are also stories to tell. There will be stories, too.

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Amy, and I am a Rick Springfield fan. Like many die hard Rick Springfield fans, Rick definitely did “star in the story of my life”. From my teen years where I yearned to meet him, to my twenties when I actually did meet him, to my thirties when I was lucky enough to work for him, there’s a lot to tell.

It all started for me with a small television, the “Souls” video and my suburban Detroit self looking for affirmation. On the internet, though, it all started here, in this webspace. And so here is where it continues on…still…fifteen years later.

Renata talked me out of it the first time, a few years back, begging me to let her run the site rather than put it down.  But now she’s ready to move on, and yet there are things that I just can’t relegate to the confines of my storage discs.  So while I am unsure what format this site will take as of now (I obviously am not looking to recreate the wheel that has been created, and recreated many, many times for Rick), I am looking to celebrate some of the amazing things that this site has done and given to the fans of Rick Springfield over the fifteen years it has been in existence.

So thanks for stopping by and I hope that you enjoy some of what lives over here in my tiny corner of the Rick Springfield cyberworld.  It isn’t official, it isn’t even up to date, but it’s still somehow here, even after all these years.  Enjoy!