David Cassidy In The News
Memories of Cassidy linger
March 10, 2001
By Susan Reinhardt
The Asheville Citizen-Times (North Carolina)
All night long, I waited for David Cassidy to call my house.
He never did.
All morning and afternoon the following day, I waited for him to call my office.
He never did.
Poof.
There dies a girlhood dream that bloomed 30 years ago as the man with the feathered bangs and bird chest sang his way into the hearts of millions of us pimply, flat-chested girls.
The next day I made one final attempt to speak to him, leaving messages with his people to call my people. Not that I have any people, though he had a line of assistants blocking him like a moat.
You'd have thought I was trying to get a hold of Ricky Martin, which would be understandably difficult as he is in the prime of chick magnetism.
But David? Come on. He's playing casinos, for goodness sake. Not that there's a thing wrong with that, but.well, it's not a stadium or a 40,000-seat arena.
In all truth, I never gave him much thought after about 1976, when Peter Frampton rocked our world with his permanent wave and double-live album. But when I heard David was performing last night and tonight at Harrah's Cherokee Casino, well, it just rekindled that unrequited love.
I wanted to be part of that crowd of women edging toward 40 or beyond, those girls of the '70s who grew weak-kneed and lovelorn every Friday night at 8 p.m. when David and the other Partridges would jam and lip-sync during their popular prime-time show.
Ask any woman, say 35 to 42, about David and she'll remember. She'll play the tunes in her head or even sing out the lyrics of such hits as his trademark song, "I Think I Love You," and "I Woke Up in Love This Morning."
We were the girls who layered those triple-platinum albums on our old crackly stereos. We carefully tore David's centerfold from Tiger Beat magazine, taping love to our walls, along with pictures of his rivals, like that cutest of Monkees, Davy Jones.
Which brings me to one of the main questions I wanted to ask him, posed by my sister, age 37.
"How come David didn't get his record plastered on the back of the Honeycombs cereal boxes? Was he jealous that Bobby Sherman's was on the back? Or the Monkees'?"
When I told her David was in town, and that I might - just might - get to interview him, she was as unimpressed as if I'd just told her I was meeting Chuck E Cheese.
"So?" she said. "What's so great about him?"
Nothing, I said. Nothing but nostalgia. Nothing but a chance to be young again, if only for an hour or two.
