Like
a lot of teenage boys, I had a poster of a professional male
racquetball player next to my bed. At the time, my friends were
adorning their walls with posters of Cindy Crawford drinking from that Pepsi can or some vestige from their older brother's Jane Fonda fixation.
But
I went to sleep each night staring at the visage of some nobody I can't
even remember nowadays, thinking that if I practiced really hard, every
day, for hours on end, I'd still never fill out eye protection goggles
like that dude.
At the time, however, I knew that if he had
ever visited our local mall -- maybe for some spiffy new Ocean Pacific
corduroy PE coach shorts -- I'm positive I would have talked my mom
into driving me over to see him, and we probably would have ended our
day in jail, arrested for either harassment or stalking. Or if I was
really lucky, both.
What I like to call my Humiliating
Racquetball Period came back in full, embarrassing waves the other day
when I was reading a New York Times story about these young girls' obsession with the new vampire movie Twilight and one of its stars: sweet, sweet Jawbone Pattinson.
Pattinson
was making an appearance at a mall in Pennsylvania, and a thousand
young girls lined up to see him, if only for a fleeting, passing
moment.
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