The Crush

I get crushes. I always have.

Maybe it started with little Steve Miller in fourth grade math class. He was cute. I liked his feathered hair. I used to gaze at him and sigh, imagining that he asked me to slow-skate with him at the roller rink.

That’s high romance to a ten-year-old.

There is no better place to indulge a crush than the distant and safe world of the screen. Looking back at the screen crushes of my life, they fall into two categories. There is The Decent Man, upstanding citizen and all around nice-guy, who nevertheless hides an unexpectedly passionate side.

Colin Firth played one of those in Bridget Jones’s Diary, but he lacked the crush factor for me. I spent the whole movie wondering what he saw in Bridget. His character can hardly have hidden depths if he falls for someone so shallow.

No, the epitome of decency in film can only be one man.

James Stewart, of course. Whether he is the hopeful pen pal in Shop Around the Corner or the besotted journalist in Philadelphia Story, he passed the true test of a romantic hero: women watching did not think I want him; instead, they thought I want to be loved like that.

You know that scene in It’s a Wonderful Life where he sits on the couch with Mary and they try to listen to the phone at the same time, but they are so close that they can’t concentrate and he is trying so hard not to fall for her but eventually he can’t help it and he kisses her? I don’t care what explicit embarrassment Hollywood comes up with nowadays. THAT is the hottest scene in all of moviedom.

Beside The Decent Man, there is another sort I have a habit of crushing on: The Grouch With a Heart of Gold. Not a bad man exactly, but a surly man, who is actually good-hearted, as long as you don’t expect niceties. The current television exemplar of this?

 

Kind, but not polite. Truthful, but flawed. Compassionate, but still a bastard. This makes Greg House attractive.

But I fell out of crush with the House character when they showed him engaging the services of a prostitute. Grouchy I can find appealing. Disease-infested slimeball is something completely different.

I still notice when characters in movie and tv appear with characteristics I have always found crush-worthy. My children have a favorite show that they watch online. In it, there is a character at once brash and vulnerable, arrogant and innocent, self-absorbed and yet loyal to his friends. I find myself watching the show with them just to see his latest adventure or amusing line. He is, in fact, the distillation of the qualities that have always inspired my crushes.

He is also a duck.

Quack, from Peep and the Big Wide World. I find myself actually singing aloud at random moments of the day, “Is there anything better than ducks? No! There’s nothing better than ducks. Oh! Sing hey, sing ho, for ducks! Whoa! Especially ducks under water!”

Yes, apparently I have feelings of smittenness for the one thing that Az the Husband can never be for me: an animated duck.

I hope he doesn’t feel too threatened.