Everyone’s been posting their first crushes today, so here’s mine.
Four of my earliest Huey Lewis-related memories, in no particular order:
1) Christmas 1986, I received a copy of Fore! on cassette. It was the first album I remember asking for, carefully writing Huey’s name on the letter I handed a bored-looking Santa at the Crossroads Mall. Bored or not, he delivered The News, along with a brand new Sony tape player. I also unwrapped Lionel Ritchie’s Dancing on the Ceiling that year, a tape I don’t recall ever listening to, save for the time I shoved it inside my sister’s Teddy Ruxpin, forcing him to sync along with “Say You, Say Me”.
Despite owning Fore! several times over on cassette and CD, I still have no idea what a fan dancer is.
2) February 14, 1987. Huey and the News were supposed to play the Charleston Civic Center in Charleston, West Virginia. My parents had considered taking me but a massive snow storm settled over the mountains, ensuring that I spent that Valentine’s Day sobbing into a pink paper covered shoebox full of Garfield-shaped cards from twelve different boys with the last name Lilly.
The next summer, a new family moved next door with a daughter my age. When she came over wearing an oversized pink tee from that very concert, it became both the basis of our friendship and a quick introduction to my life partner, Bitterness.
3) When that same neighbor and I played our Little Tykes version of house, it meant I served a lump of plastic peas to an invisible version of Huey, ignoring her TigerBeat centerfold selection in favor of a thirty-eight year old father of two. In our elementary school brains, being in love meant fixing dinner for someone.
We didn’t know anything about sex at the time, although a girl named Chrissy told us an elaborate metaphor involving trains. She also peed in my Care Bears trash can during a slumber party so that pretty much shattered her credibility.
4) I once threw a massive temper tantrum in Elliott’s grocery store until my mother bought the issue of People that had him on the cover. I immediately took it home, carefully cut his picture out with a pair of pinking shears and it hung over my bed for several summers. It seems like maybe this should’ve been a warning sign to my parents, that my elementary-aged friends were debating between the Two Coreys and I was mad about a married dude who was pushing forty.
That didn’t shape my future relationships AT ALL, I said with my tongue ramming through the cheek on the opposite side of my face.
