The Day Taylor Hanson Finally Got To Meet Me

Taylor Hanson was the first person I ever imagined having sex with. Before Taylor, my fantasies about boys (captain planet and the red power ranger in particular) encompassed them being injured in some way and me taking care of them. In my weird little daydreams I would make them soup and serve it to them in the single bed where they lay in the spare room of my house. But the ultra-effeminate Taylor Hanson changed all that. He was the perfect pre-teen crush. His girliness was non-threatening and it didn’t hurt at all that he sang stirring songs about girls whose names sounded similar to mine (hello Madeleine!). You could close your eyes when listening to that breathy voice of his and imagine those songs were about you. And I never quite got over him.

So you can imagine my excitement when a month ago I was awakened by a text from my parents that read:

Hi Marion. Dad says “down with Bruce, Hanson forever”.

It turns out, Hanson were going to be playing live in the studio AT MY PLACE OF WORK. Bless my mum and dad, they know how excited I get about Hanson and thoroughly encourage me. I think I actually heard tears in my mum’s voice when I called her to tell her about the Hanson experience which ensued.

When I arrived at work the following week, I had a skip in my step. Other people were excited that Hanson were going to be in the studio, but they were excited about seeing a band they perceived to be one hit wonders from 1997. I was Maz seeing the first boy she ever loved excited. I was frothing with excitement. I was over the moon. I ripped my closet apart. I washed my hair and agonized over the flyaways that wouldn’t lie flat. I couldn’t eat my dinner. I felt weepy. I woke up at five and lay in the dark, rehearsing what I was going to say. I wanted them to know that I was a long time fan, but not a weird obsessed fan. I had devised a series of witty, yet endearing stories, which would demonstrate both my charm and sense of humour. Stories that would resonate with them to the point where they would undoubtedly ask me about where they should go out tonight and would I care to join them. Taylor would realize that we actually belonged together and beg me to leave Nick for him. I would decline but not before we shared a lingering kiss.

To be honest the only story I had come up with was that someone stole one of my Hanson CDs from my car once. But I was sure I could spin it somehow.

Finally the moment arrived, and at 7.30am on a Friday morning I went down the rabbit hole – also known as the little side door of studio 22. And there he stood. Shrouded in a halo of light, his perfectly quaffed hair framing that divine face, just as I’d seen in so many adolescent daydreams. There were other people around, but all I could see was him and me, forever and forever. By the time the first notes of Mmmbop washed over me, I was in a state of what can only be described as mild hysteria. My chin was quivering as I sang along and did my best not to cry. And when the song drew to a close and the show cut to an ad break, it became apparent that this could well be the moment I had waited for all these years. It was zero hour. Taylor time.

After a few awkward, shuffling moments of lurking and loitering at an uncomfortably close distance he turned in my direction. I requested a photo. He introduced himself and I ignored him, forgetting to tell him my name. All intriguing and titillating stories left me and I was a simpering mess.

“I’m coming to see you tonight” I said twice. And then oh god oh GOD, he had his arm around me as we took a picture.

“I’ll see you tonight then” he told me, and strode off.

Taylor Hanson touching me

And that was it for me. I dissolved. I had to leave the studio post haste to cry in the car park. Wracked with sobs I ran into one of the children from the Voice Kids. For some reason he thought I was super excited to see him and wrapped his pudgy little arms around me. I brushed him off; horrified that someone could ruin the fact that the last person with his arms around me was Taylor Hanson.  But I had to suck it up, because they were playing another song in two minutes, and I’d be damned if I was going to miss an opportunity to stand in the front row of my own private Hanson concert and pretend Taylor was singing and banging that tambourine just for me. I scuttled back into the dark, wiping the joyous tears from my eyes.

After a stirring rendition of Get The Girl Back (I was the only person in the studio who knew all the words, other than my boy Tay) more photo opportunities arose. So again, I approached the holy trinity. This time Isaac introduced himself to me and shook my hand. And again, I forgot what my name was because his hands were SO SOFT! However, I did have my wits about me enough to tell him

“You are my husband’s favourite Hanson brother. Whenever your parts come on in the car, he always says ‘sing it Isaac’ hehe”

Isaac looked at me, nodded and responded “ok”. We took a photo and I walked away satisfied, knowing I had to leave the studio before I ruined this perfect moment. I didn’t quite pull off the mystique I had been aiming for, but fuck it, Taylor had put his arm around me and he’d smelt even better than I’d always imagined.

A very flattering photo of me in a Hanson sandwich

The rest of the day people were laughing about the queue of girls who had lined up outside the studio hoping to get a glimpse of Hanson.

“As if we’d let those crazy obsessed girls in!” someone proclaimed.

Little did they know, one had slipped through the net.

Maz Reviews Bruce Springsteen's Ass

There is nothing lazier than people who speak in clichés.  Katy Perry’s Roar for example is entirely made up of clichés (I’ve got the eye of the tiger, already brushing off the dust, Cos I am a champion gah!). Instead of inspiring me, Roar makes me want to punch Katy right in her ass. Same goes for motivational quotes on facebook. I don’t feel inspired by a picture of a wishing well captioned with some inane shit like “Dream it. Believe it. Achieve it”. Because really, when you’re reeling off the clichés you’re just saying a bunch of stuff that’s been said so many times it’s become, well, clichéd.

I do however, have to vouch for a motivational image I saw the other day of a little fellow reaching towards the stars. It was captioned, logically, “reach for the stars”. Yes it’s your everyday sub-par vom inducing meme, but I actually did reach for the stars recently and it felt pretty damn delightful.

As you may or may not know, I have a very slight obsession with Bruce Springsteen. My car is called Bruce, I listen to his music every day, a whopping 20% of my instagram posts are about him and most importantly, he is my number one celebrity crush, my religion and my muse. When he announced his latest tour I spent $1000 dollars on tickets for my family, who all get equally as excited about our lord and saviour, Bruce. I made my parents go and queue in the rain hours ahead of time in order to ensure we would be right at the front of the stage so that, just maybe, I could touch that beautiful hunk ‘o’ man. And touch him I did!

Figure 1: My Dad's enthusiastic response to the news I had acquired sold-out Bruce Springsteen tickets for both he and my Mum

Springsteen is the most enthusiastic performer you will ever see. He does three hour-long concerts with more energy than a hessian sack full of toddlers, and during these performances, he likes to crowd surf. Enter the ultimate “it would only happen to Maz” moment. During a particularly badass rendition of Spirit in the Night Bruce launched himself into the crowd. Falling backwards onto the welcoming sea of hands like Janice does after slamming Regina George at the end of Mean Girls, he continued to sing as the audience slowly delivered him to the stage at the front of the arena. As The Boss approached, I craned my neck to see whether or not he was going to pass over my head, and could vaguely make out a figure up and to the left of me. Using my finely honed basketball attack skills, I dropped my shoulder and charged left until I was right in the path of the almighty Bruce.

Time stopped. My heart rate hastened. My mouth dried. I saw his leather lace-up boots, and then his ankles and suddenly the moment was upon me. Bruce Springsteen’s tight little bottom was directly above me. I reached up and with my full, open hand, grabbed his right bum cheek and squeezed. Oh, the ecstasy. For that one beautiful second, I was molesting the man of my dreams. It was a little sweaty but let me tell you, it was firm and pert and round - everything a good ass should be. Before I knew it, he had been placed gently on the stage and, overwhelmed, I burst into tears. I cried on Nick and then turned to my dad and cried on him too. There is very little I will be able to achieve now that will trump the time I grabbed Bruce Springsteen's behind.

And that is the story of the time that I groped the 64-year-old man I am in love with and then cried snot onto both my 61-year-old dad and my husband in celebration. So follow your dreams kids, it’s like the saying goes: reach for the stars, even if you miss, your hand will touch his moon. I know that was feeble, but you get what I was trying to do there.

Bruce Almighty

Disclaimer: This is not meant to be funny. It's just about how much I love Bruce Springsteen.

 

The great thing about marriage is that you always have someone to go everywhere with you. When you say “we are going to see Hanson” for example, your spouse is legally obliged to respond “sure Pumpkin, here is my credit card.” So when my husband gleefully told me Bruce Springsteen was coming to Australia, I put on my married face and booked the tickets. I will freely admit that I was not a Bruce fan at this point in time. But BOY OH BOY am I one now. I read in an article “10 Reasons I Hate Bruce Springsteen” that any Bruce fan to whom you mention that you are not particularly fond of The Boss will respond that you can’t make this call unless you’ve seen him live. I have to whole-heartedly agree.

Last Monday night saw me arriving at the Allphones arena in Sydney and taking my B reserve seat. Hotdog and mid-strength beer in hand, I was fully prepared for the boredom which inevitably comes with seeing someone perform you don’t really care for. Shockingly, however, from the first strains of “American Land” I was enamoured. I literally had to hold back tears as the lights came up on Bruce and the E-Street band; it was just so damn stirring. I could feel the bass deep in my sternum, the brass section filling my ears and Bruce’s rugged, handsome face broadcasting a heart-warming smile to the stadium. Ah, Bruce. I now truly believe in the notion of love at first sight. His flavour-savour immediately made me regret all the times I had mocked Nick for his own stylish facial hair decisions, the deep crow’s feet etched into his face only giving more credence to the heart-wrenching, comical and stirring lyrics he sings. By the time he was crowd surfing the audience, he owned my Hungry Heart.

Looking around the stadium I could see that the feeling was well and truly not limited to my one little self. The audience, which was conspicuously sans-hipster and amazingly, missing the usual plethora of mobile phones – held high above the head recording the moment to be savoured at a later date – all appeared to be as smitten as I was. Even with the tiniest tilt of his head or wave of his hand, the crowd was under his control. And how could you not be? Bruce is like a god. The giant screens which hung high above the audience focused on Bruce’s face, making it all too easy to imagine I was sitting in a stadium somewhere in Middle America in 1983, not 2013. Either by design or just by some quirk of the lighting, the shadows which fell across The Boss’s face took years off him; the imperfection of his nose, the thickness of his hair and the glimmer of his eyes revealed him to be someone in their mid-thirties, not someone almost twice that. So I felt myself fall straight down the rabbit hole landing in a deep infatuation with a man who is forty years my senior. He moves around the stage staggering slightly, almost as if the legend that is “The Boss” weighs heavily upon him. Each time he lithely breaks into a dance or swings from his mic stand, he delivers on this legend, more beautifully and delicately than I could have imagined. I am occasionally distracted by what I think is the audience voicing their dissent – and then I realise they are simple saying “Bruce”. It must be difficult being a rock star with a name that is incredibly similar to the word “boo”.  

The kicker, though, is this. His inner beauty far surpasses his tight jeans-and-waistcoated-sexiness. Throughout his performance he constantly singles people out; giving a smile, a nod, a wave or a point, undoubtedly touching thousands of individual lives as he moves about the stadium. It is amazing to witness one individual having such reach, spreading unbridled joy throughout a stadium which holds 21,000 people. “Dancing in the Dark” became my new favourite song as he pulled an audience member onto the stage and held her tenderly in his arms; I have never been so overcome with jealousy. Every single woman in the audience swooned, those who didn’t were either lesbians or asexual.

Even writing this, I am still in some sort of shell-shocked state. Bruce turned a few of my fundamental beliefs on their head over the two nights we went to watch him. Upon returning home I knew we had to go back, “this can’t be the last I’ve seen of him” I thought “we had a connection!” So we purchased tickets for his final Sydney show and hopped back on the train to bask in the glory of his Friday performance. We were not disappointed. While he failed to play Born in the USA on Monday (a fact which I had lamented all week) he delivered right at the end of his epic final performance. Now, I usually loathe the type of Americana which makes those born in the States feel compelled to constantly remind us of this fact. However, this song is in a whole other dimension to even Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” or Lenny Kravitz’s “American Woman”. Springsteen’s rendition of this iconic song encompasses some sort of stirring magic usually reserved for only the best national anthems. There’s something in the way he delivered this song, like it wasn’t his, like it was all of ours. And to be fair, it kind of is. A shared history of war; a camaraderie we forged in the jungles of Vietnam and the difficult and unrewarding return home shell-shocked and broken, ties the Australian people to this histrionic hymn almost as much as it does the Americans. Every intake of breath and soul-shaking note sung conveyed this to us and bonded us more closely, uniting every audience member. The fact that he so rarely plays this, the best known of his hits, only solidified the impression that we are as special and important to him as he is to us.

As his three hour performance drew to a close, I felt like my favourite character in a novel was dying. “Don’t go!” I silently screamed. In that moment I felt I would never be the same again, how could this man who I have so recently come to love be walking out of my life, just like that? The house lights came on and I urged Nick not to leave immediately. Maybe we could see him one last time? I desperately wanted just one more glimpse. And while these sorts of hopes are dashed more often than not, again the almighty Bruce refused to disappoint. He emerged from beneath the stage and stalked towards us, handing out picks and signing autographs along the way. One fan even dropped the pick he was thrown and Bruce made a point of picking it up and returning it to him, ahhh, what a hero. He stopped right in front of us, a look of glee gracing his strapping features as he spied a young boy immediately to my right. A brief word to the security guard and he returned with a harmonica for the lucky young’un. The goodness that is at his core continues to give me goose bumps. “See you later” I called as he strolled down the hallway that lead backstage and out of my life. And I pray to God that I do, because until I am in his presence again I really will feel like something is missing. That essence of Bruce. That Springsteen magic. Those very specific tingles which can only be evoked by THE BOSS.  

Australian Psycho

The idea of psychopathy interests me immensely. After reading John Ronson’s The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through The Madness Industry^*, a narrative-style non-fictional romp into the inner workings of dangerous and corporate psychopaths, I was further intrigued. After finishing the book, and equipped with Hare’s checklist of what constitutes the cold and senseless condition, I actually went around diagnosing many people I know as psychopaths. I thought I was an amateur psychiatrist (I like to appoint myself different vocations from week to week, it shakes things up – more than once I’ve decided I was a private eye, but I’ll get to that in another post). Inevitably though, I turned on myself and began to wonder if I were a psychopath. Although Ronson clearly states that if one ever worries that they are a psychopath then they are not one (this feels like a delightful riddle) I still look back at my life and think that I definitely had a lot of psychopathic promise.

I believe there are three precursors to psychopathy which can be observed in children including:  wetting the bed, having a fascination with fire and being cruel to small children and animals. During my life I had exhibit all these concerning symptoms at one time or another. I am going to immediately dismiss the first and focus just on the second two because, let’s be honest, who didn’t wet the bed as a child? To me, this one seems completely arbitrary (and I would know, as I did one unit of psychiatry in my science degree, so am pretty much the authority on all things to do with it).  

Firstly, let’s discuss my fascination with fire. Apart from having the winter chore of lighting the fire in our slow combustion stove (which is more about my parents’ fascination with being warm than my fascination with fire) I was always interested in burning things, lighting candles and playing with matches. Mostly I remember always wanting to burn the edges of my homework and stain it with tea to make it look old. I still don’t know why I would want my homework to look old, I was 8, how old could it possibly be?  This whole practice seems retrospectively hilarious; how on earth does burning the edges of a page make it seem antique? Have all documents which have reached at least one hundred years in age survived some sort of fire only to be singed around the edges, the fire miraculously stopping just before the text? And what was the cause of all of these olden day fires from which important papers where being saved just in the nick of time? Heaven knows. But there you have it, fascination with fire, check!

Secondly, cruelty to small animals is a big red flag when attempting to identify a future psychopath, and this I had in spades. When I was small (six to ten years of age) I engaged in the following activities:

ü  I once squeezed a slug to death

ü  I pulled wings off flies (but who hasn’t done this, so it doesn’t really count)

ü  I squeezed my cat George so hard and he made such a terrible smell that my dad made me ring the vet and explain what I had done (HAHA, my parents were so creative with their punishments, maybe that was why I was so creative with my torture?)

ü  I left my guinea pig in the sun and he died of heat stroke after an amazing amount of yellow stuff came out of his mouth

ü  I left another guinea pig on a chair and someone sat on him, he also died, see previous point about yellow stuff

ü  I put a lizard in a fry pan (which was on)

ü  I tied my rabbit to the kitchen table and left him there for an hour (he was eventually hit by a car in a separate incident. Obviously.)

All of these I feel horrible about now, although I feel less bad about the guinea pigs because I don’t like guinea pigs that much. What are they? Are they a really long, hairy neck with legs? Or do they have no neck at all? And just when you think they are all warm you realise they have pissed on you. Yep. I don’t like guinea pigs. Anyway, I digress.

So I have covered the fire and the cruelty to small animals, but there is the one reason which trumps all previous nut-bag behaviour and makes me feel pretty sure I was on a psychopathic trajectory as a child. Take a deep breath, constant reader, because this is bad.

When I was about eight or nine we would go to the house of a family friend who had a small child. For some reason this child irked me, I don’t know what it was about it, but it followed me around and it just had an arrogance to it that I DID NOT LIKE. The child was old enough to stand up and walk, but not old enough to speak. And so I used to pinch it. And when I say pinch, I mean hard, as hard as I could in fact – I would grab what I could between my thumb and forefinger and squeeze, if I could incorporate some fingernail action into this I was stoked. The worst part about this is that I used to pinch the kid because I knew it was not old enough to tell anyone what had happened, it would suddenly start to cry and I would look innocently and quizzically to the parents – “what on earth has happened to your darling child to make it shriek so?” my butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth face said. While really I was thinking “what a nifty game!” Unfortunately, I have never felt remorse about this (lack of remorse: another point on the psychopath checklist. TICK.)

I still don’t know if something happened in my life to stop me from evolving into the psychopath I was destined to be, or maybe I did become one – who knows. Go ahead and judge me if you want, but just know that I will come over to your house, pinch your kids and squeeze your cat until it farts.

 

*Ronson, Jon. 2011, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through The Madness Industry. Riverhead Books. USA Buy it here - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Psychopath-Test-Jon-Ronson/dp/0330492276

 

 

 

How To Get Boys To Like You

I have been having periodic insomnia since the Hanson concert I attended last September. Strangely enough it has been accompanied by an unshakable feeling of melancholia. My stomach won’t stop churning and I just feel down. So, after another sleepless night and a bit of a google it occurred to me that I still have an immense crush on Taylor Hanson. Can this be possible? Can it be that someone who adorned my pre-adolescent walls could still be playing on my mind like the chorus of mmmbop fifteen years later? Unfortunately, this seems to be the case. As the first strains of Thinking of You floated across the aged and mostly overweight audience of the Enmore theatre I was transported back to 1997. Ah, 1997, when I was ten and an amazing weekend meant a metal slinky and a staircase, a time when a well put together outfit meant that your scrunchie and your leggings matched and “make up” meant body glitter meticulously applied to your temples; those were the days! I do however, remember this golden era of my life being tinged with sadness, the kind of incurable sorrow caused only by the most intense of crushes.

I think it needs to be said that crushes in the nineties were not the same as crushes now. Take Justin Bieber for example. Any ten year Belieber can simply youtube his name and watch endless hair flicking, hip gyrating videos. Bieber’s songs can be immediately downloaded and listened to at any time and from anywhere in the world. In the nineties a crush on a pop star was a full time job, requiring blank cassette tapes to be in your tape deck at all times so that when the songs you loved came on the radio they could be immediately captured with a synchronised depression of both the triangle and circle buttons. CD singles were purchased in the lead up to the album release (at between 5 and 10 dollars a pop) and then the full studio album was acquired for $30 – most of which you already owned in cd single form. One had to get up at 6am on a Saturday morning to watch rage in the hopes that the video clip for “I Will Come To You” would be played. This often meant sitting through hours of clips from bands you didn’t like such as Whigfield and Mousse T (who, for the record, both sang embarrassing words like ‘horny’ and ‘sexy’ which always caused me to blush deeply if either of my parents were around) in the hopes of catching four minutes and nine seconds of Hanson bliss. Yes. Nineties crushes were more involved, and therefore, better and more important.

Rewind fifteen years and my most prized possessions were my Hanson posters. This was back in the day before the advent of twitpics, google image search or cheap colour printing; meaning that each full sized poster had to be hunted down with multiple copies of TV Hits, Smash Hits, Girlfriend and Dolly being purchased. To place even more strict parameters on this treasure hunt each magazine would only have one full sized poster lurking at its centre, these were double sided (which helped a little with the odds of striking it rich). The scarcity of posters featuring the three long-haired crooners, coupled with the fact that my annual income was approximately $200 meant that each poster was priceless. In the end I had about twelve, so really I was pretty much the nineties version of a tiny millionaire. Weirdly enough I diligently applied Lipsmackers to the Hanson brothers’ lips every night before bed, which meant that the lips of all the boys on all the posters were translucent. One day my mum asked me, with a wry smile, if I had been kissing my posters. Mortified I told her that I had simply been allowing them to sample my large Lipsmacker collection and she left the room. As soon as she was gone I tried to remedy the situation and upon taking down my favourite poster (crimped hair, blue background and bubbles) discovered that a whole nest of huntsman spiders was living behind it. Maybe it was the delicious scented lip gloss, but I had a sneaking suspicion it was the lure of Taylor’s penetrating gaze, those spiders were as close to heaven as they’d ever get.

My love for Taylor was unshakable, but I was no fool. I was entirely aware that I would never have him. So I did the next best thing a girl could do – I found someone who looked similar to him and transferred all of my pre-pubescent, creepy stalker love onto them. I won’t name names but I will say that Taylor2 had flowing golden locks and caught my bus. He was a mighty high school student, while I was a mere fifth grader. I must reiterate that the nineties was an innocent time before technology, so when I say “stalk” I actually, LITERALLY mean stalk.

I would catch Taylor2’s bus every day, and when the bus route changed so that we no longer caught the same bus I would just catch his bus anyway and walk the extra two kilometres to school. I was the only girl on a bus that went to an all-boys school. Mmm, subtle. Years passed and I entered high school (yes, this is a stalker love story that spans years; the type of crazy with which I am infected is deep-seated and patient). And still I caught his bus, patiently waiting to be more than five feet tall and to maybe, vaguely, resemble a woman. Unfortunately for me, I am still waiting for either of these events to occur, so after four years of having a crush on Taylor2 and looking no taller or more womanly, I decided that the whole thing had come to a head and I must reveal my undying love to him. So I looked him up in the phone book and I wrote him a letter. Keep in mind I am probably thirteen years old at this point and anyone who has been thirteen years of age will know that this is the most awkward and embarrassing time in a person’s life. I, for one, was constantly afraid of judgment and rejection. Enter the crazy. I didn’t handwrite (or type, which would actually have made more sense) this letter, I CUT OUT LETTERS FROM THE NEWSPAPER AND GLUED THEM ONTO A PIECE OF PAPER. Yes. I wrote, what could only be described as, a “ransom-style” secret admirer love letter. Oh dear.

But wait, there’s actually more. In the letter I included an email address for an account that I had set up at astroboymail, which was a thing at the time. If I’m not mistaken, the username was “rockstar” (which was actually a step up from my original email address funkygalgroovychic@hotmail.com), and I asked him to email me. I anonymously told him that I loved him and asked him to email me - girl’s got game! I don’t know what I expected, probably something along the lines of:

Hey! Is this that tiny girl from the bus who looks like either a giant baby or a midget adult? The one who has been staring at me for the last four years? I sure hope so, because damn! Nothing’s sexier than a lurker. From Taylor2.  

Anyway, I added him on ICQ and continued to give him cryptic clues as to who I was until he tired of me. Or MSN was invented – I’m not sure which one it was.

So there you have it, my little foray into stalking – before the phrase was a socially acceptable, harmless form of voyeurism. I’d like to say that I never did anything like that again but that would be a lie because into my teen years I committed innumerable ring-up-hang-ups (the stalker’s bread and butter) sent one boy a MIX CD anonymously (incredibly creepy) and cast love spells on people (oh god!). I still wonder if this was just some odd quirk that I had, or if other people got this caught up in crushes, but at least those people knew how I felt – even if they did sleep with a night light from then on.

Note: I blocked Taylor2 from viewing this post. So if you are seeing this via Facebook you are NOT him L.