Since yesterday’s post, I’ve been thinking about the whole teen idol phenomenon. When I was a kid, I was plastering my bedroom walls with posters of Donny Osmond and clipping articles out of Teen Beat and Tiger Beat magazines. And I was listening to his records—45s and LPs alike—and fantasizing that he was singing in that sweet, pre-adolescent voice just to me. “Puppy Love” and “Hey, Girl” and “Sweet and Innocent”…of course, never “Go Away, Little Girl.” 🙂 I just hoped that someday, Donny would notice one of my letters and write back, and we’d fall hopelessly in love.

I could never conceive of being able to visit his website or follow him on Twitter, let alone download his music from iTunes or review them on amazon.com.

Little girls today are, I suspect, feeling the same way about Justin Bieber and the Jonas Brothers as I felt about Donny. I wonder…is there an app for that?

This was the first Donny Osmond record I ever owned, given to me as a gift by a babysitter who had realized that she was too cool to be a Donny fan. I spent hours staring into Donny’s soulful brown eyes. Swoon!

By the way, this same babysitter later gave me her LP of the movie soundtrack for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band when she realized that it was cooler to listen to the original Beatles versions of those songs than the covers by the likes of Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees. 🙂 (I, however, continue to prefer the covers to the originals. Is that heretical?) She also let me stay up later than my little brothers on Saturday nights so I could watch Saturday Night Live with her—the early years. This program apparently had her peers’ seal of approval!