Shaun Cassidy and me – The love story continues

Part II
Imaginary friends and paper towel tanktops
I continued to watch The Hardy Boys every week and despise that whore Nancy Drew.



And so my love for Shaun grew and grew, and, as is only natural, things progressed with us to the obvious next level:

The Hardy Boys had become my imaginary friends.

Here's how it worked. My friend Kelly, who lived down the block and had two older brothers who not only wouldn't play with her, but also tortured her, spent a lot of time at my house. We played pretend girl games like Gilligan's Island and Supermodel and she was, I think, the first person I ever kissed. We were five though, so calm down, you goddamned drooling sex perverts.

Anyway, Kelly always enthusiastically jumped right into the strange, illusory worlds I created. She was the perfect, willing beta to my alpha-girl commander of pretend play, always consenting to be Ken or Gilligan or even Jack in "Three's Company".

It was during these pretend games with Kelly that I first got the idea of playing Nancy Drew. This morphed into Nancy Drew and 'Friend' (She was, of course the 'friend'), then eventually it became Sexy Nancy Drew and 'Sexy Friend'.

Being sexy at five meant taking off our shirts and sneaking a paper towel roll up to my room, then ripping off lengths of Bounty and winding them around our middles, thereby creating our own home made tube tops. Crimes always got solved better when Sexy Nancy Drew and Sexy Friend wore disco clothes.

Now, in this game, we didn't actually solve any crimes, we just chased the Hardy Boys around my house. We would spend hours running up and down the stairs, clutching at our tube tops, popping in and out of bedrooms, on the hunt for those elusive Boys.
Once we found them, we would bring them back to my room (sometimes via lasso...I also loved Lynda Carter's 'Wonder Woman' at the time) and kiss them.

Chasing The Hardy Boys was hard, dirty work.
We would skid into the kitchen and demand my mother tell us their whereabouts. She'd look up, take a sip of coffee, then gesture wearily with her cigarette, "That way..." and go back to her book.

I played this game whenever Kelly came over, but also by myself. Sometimes I would skip the chasing part altogether and bring the Boys Hardy right into my room. Sometimes I let my little sister play too, but at three, Lisa did not yet understand the intricacies of seductively solving crime. Not to worry, though. That Christmas, Lisa and I would receive Shaun Cassidy dolls and things were about to completely change...



(to be continued...)