Double fantasy

There's a YouTube video currently going around that was picked up by the major media news outlets this past week showing a high school kid asking Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition cover girl Kate Upton if she would be his prom date (see here).

Ha ha ha, I laughed to myself. Yeah, right. Good luck, kid. Until this got me to thinking about my own fantasies.

Back in my younger days, when I was in my 50s, I had severe crushes on country music stars Patty Loveless and Martina McBride.

My fantasies involved being their love interest in their music videos.

For Patty, I was the guy wooing her on the steps of some joint in New Orleans in "Hurt Me Bad (In a Real Good Way)."

For Martina, I replaced her husband at the end of "My Baby Loves Me." Martina, with her incredibly blue eyes, gives us a particularly pouty — or is it a come hither? — look near the end of the video.

Sigh. Patty and Martina. My double fantasy.

It never occurred to me to ask them out on dates. I'm not sure how I could have gotten my wife's permission for such a project anyway.

The best I could ever do was go to their concerts. We've seen each artist at least three times each during the past couple of decades and I'll have to be satisfied with that, I guess.

Kim and me with Patty Loveless in another lifetime.

I remember one Patty Loveless concert in particular at the Alabama Theater in North Myrtle Beach. Somehow I was able to score front row center seats. I also had plans to meet a female Internet friend (we'd met on a Patty Loveless chat site) at the concert. We'd never physically met before and we had no clue what each other looked like, but I told her where I was sitting. Front row center is not hard to find. A few minutes before the concert started, this drop-dead gorgeous woman appeared before me and asked if I was Bruce.

"Wanda?" I stuttered.

"Yes," she said and gave me a big unexpected hug. My wife could only look on incredulously, even though she knew I was going to meet a woman there. We just figured the odds were that she'd likely be matronish, not swimsuit modelish. I had somehow suddenly acquired the power to summon beautiful women at will, and total strangers at that. Where was this power when I really needed it back when I was in high school?

Apparently this magic worked with Patty, too, if only briefly. One of the first songs in her lineup was "I'm That Kind of Girl," a cute country rocker and I was singing along with her. You have to remember that while she is on the stage, our seats are probably less than 10 feet away.

"I'm That Kind of Girl" is not usually a song that many men sing along to, but I was happily croaking out the tune when Patty and I somehow made eye contact. I smiled sheepishly because I was singing this male-inappropriate song, and Patty — I'm sure understanding the absurdity of the moment — smiled back at me.

I know she was smiling at me because Kim instantly asked me, "What did you do?" as if I was signaling Patty in some sort of secret code or something.

This was probably a hard night for Kim, now that I think about it.

I wish I could remember this moment, but I was in a semiconscious state.

My Martina moment came at the same theater, maybe a year or so later. This was relatively early in Martina's career. She was a rising star and we had post concert backstage access as a result of being fan club members. So after the show we lined up with other fan club folks and waited our turn.

The line bent around a corner and Kim stepped out to take a peek.

"Bruce, she's beautiful," said Kim. That did it. I turned to mush. When it came to our turn to pose for the camera with Martina, I was trying desperately to think of something clever to say. I'm pretty sure I was semiconscious. I put my arm around her back, like we were related or something. Then I think I scolded her for filming the "Wild Angels" video on top of a skyscraper in New York City. "Don't ever do that again," I said.

Smooth. Sometimes you've got it, sometimes you don't.

I've pretty much lost my puppy love for these women. Now my double fantasy involves them as caregivers handing me my dose of Lipitor and beta blockers.