Oh, my Inner Fangirl, how I love thee! You can be fickle but you are a constant source of amusement. What about you, dear reader? What kind of fangirl are you? Are you a “One man woman” type, who is totally devoted to but one object of obsession? Do you have perhaps two or three favourites? Or are you a multi-fandom, multi-tasking fangirl who blithely moves from one crush to the next, ever expanding the list of favourites to whom you give your fangirling heart? Me? I’m a one-man-woman only in Real Life. My husband is the love of my life, my best friend, and luckily for him, he understands that the Inner Fangirl’s heart is an entirely separate entity. Fangirling is a hobby of sorts, the thing that keeps me young and happy and helps me to face my Real Life with a smile on my face. She has been with me since about the age of 12. There was a short spell where she was kind of snoozing in the corner, in the few years after I married and had babies to love and nurture. But she woke with a vengeance and led me into a depression-fuelled, mid-life crisis themed playground. There are these moments, in life as well as in fandom, where the world seems to shift on its axis, and when you regain your equilibrium, life has changed for you. I remember my first “fantasy boyfriend” and the moment I fell in love with him. Donny Osmond.

Yes, I’m not even embarrassed to admit it. I was 12 years old and standing in the corner store looking at magazines. There was a picture of this cute boy with a toothy smile on the front and I felt that butterflies in the tummy thing. I bought the magazine with my precious pocket money, read everything I could about him, searched the newsagent for more. I joined the fan club. No internet back then, we had to Wait for the mail, Wait for the next magazine, Wait for them to tour or release a new record. Well, as I grew up, so did my Inner Fangirl. We went through the Bay City Rollers phase, all tartan and plus fours and adorable Scottish accents

the Sherbet phase with satin bomber jackets and satin flares and hanging round outside the Southern Cross Hotel and Festival Hall.

We watched Countdown religiously. There were other bands we liked, on and off, but only a few that we stuck with for any great length of time. I looked older than my age and at 17 I began going to pubs to see bands. We were from that lucky generation who saw all the great bands before they hit the big time. INXS, Men At Work, Australian Crawl, Split Enz/Crowded House, Hunters and Collectors… and so many more who didn’t quite get there but provided us with hours of entertainment and good music. While music and musicians were our prime source of obsession, there was the odd fangirly fling with an actor or two. She had me convinced we should marry Christian Slater or William Baldwin for a while. Patrick Swayse and Keanu Reeves were on our radar too. Eventually the crowded smoky pubs and loud music took their toll on me and we slowed down on the pub-crawling alcohol-fuelled late nights. I had a child and a broken relationship with a roadie behind me and things needed to change. That’s when we discovered tennis and then basketball as a source of fangirly goodness. The players were all young and fit and healthy, unlike the vampire-like muso’s who were lucky if they ever saw the sun and lived on junk food and booze and drugs. We drove courtesy cars at the Tennis and got to know some of the players. And we joined the supporters club for our favourite basketball team and hung out with the players after the games. It’s kinda hard to be fangirly obsessed when you know the people personally but we managed a degree of fangirlness in spite of ourselves. Then came Love Marriage Baby Carriage etc and the Inner Fangirl was only to be found awake in rare moments, such as when the basketball team and a singer friend came to my new hometown up north, both on the same weekend. I had a “thing” for Ewan MacGregor that barely hit the obsession mark.

Mostly the I.F. snoozed in a remote corner of my mind. A few years on, I’d passed my 40th birthday and the mad mid-life crisis thing started. While I wouldn’t want to go through that time again, the depression, anxiety, hating myself and everybody else, there were some good things that happened. I made some very good friends online and we are still friends now. I began writing again, something I had not tried since my mid-teens. I learned a lot too and most important of all, I survived! I’m here to tell the story. So here’s what this has to do with being a fangirl. One day while reading through an online scrapbooking forum, I found a picture a member had posted. It was a pic of Legolas from Lord of the Rings, all blonde hair and blue eyes with an arrow notched and ready to let fly. As a family we had missed the LotR onslaught in favour of Harry Potter. I’d never read the LOTR books, although I’d once tried to read The Hobbit and not got very far. My mum had sent me the first two Harry Potter books and I’d seen the first movie twice. But somehow we had an LOTR calendar in the kitchen, and when my husband decided to hire the movie, I had my back to the screen and my face towards the computer. Now and then I turned to see what was happening but couldn’t really dredge up the motivation to watch it all. Legolas was cute but whatever, ya know? Then I saw this picture. And scrolled down to see the next picture, which was of a gorgeous young man with curly brown hair and chocolate brown eyes. The caption told me that it was Orlando Bloom… the actor who played Legolas… the Inner Fangirl woke up screaming… and there before me was the long slide into the world of geeky fangirling weirdness. We dived together. I joined an Orlando forum, made friends, we all became disillusioned with the anal retentive web mistress and left to create our own forum devoted to Orlando. It was a huge learning curve that I am grateful for even today. It was good for my middle-aged brain. It was good for my spirit and good for my health (ok so a lot of late nights and sitting at the computer may not have been so good for my physical health but I’m talking holistically here). Because of my fangirly interests, I have read Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion and The Children of the Hurin and I am very well acquainted with the LOTR movies. Just try beating me at LOTR Trivial Pursuit! I have rekindled my interest in CS Lewis and The Chronicles of Narnia. I’ve read all the Harry Potter books and seen the movies. I’ve explored the world of Troy, thanks to Orlando and Sean Bean being in the movie. My world has expanded exponentially with each new fangirly crush. Remember those moments I talked about earlier? The earth shifting off its axis moments. I still have them. It’s the unexpectedness that makes them memorable. There was the one that happened when I was watching Phantom of the Opera… the scene where the Phantom (Erik, as we in the know call him) is leading Christine down the long hallways with the gold statues. I know I’m not alone in that one, because as a result, I discovered Gerry Butler, and an officially unofficial fan board full of crazy wonderful beautiful fans called Tarts. I became part of an awesome group of Aussie women who met together a few times to celebrate their love for this man. We had a saying on the board… we came for Gerry, we stayed for the Tarts. There was a list of course. There is always a list. One friend calls hers the “Stud Farm”. My list, conservatively titled “Top Ten Favourites” had, for some time, three number ones rather than a one two three… Orlando, Gerry and Sean. I could not decide which one I liked more. In fact, it seemed to depend on which one had a new movie out. The rest of the list was fairly transitional. I developed a thing for Ben Barnes when he played Prince Caspian, despite his atrocious Mediterranean accent in the movie (which he appeared to have lost by the time Voyage of the Dawn Treader came out--go figure!) There was the obvious moment when we saw Daniel Craig emerge from the ocean in blue swimming trunks as James Bond. I even joined one of his fan boards but while he’s still my favourite Bond, we never reached obsession level with him. When Christopher Eccelston, as Dr Who, kissed Rose Tyler, we realised it was ok to crush on Dr Who, and did so repeatedly with David Tennant and Matt Smith. We’re playing a waiting game to see if things will be the same with the new Dr. I tried to avoid the whole Twilight madness but got suckered in by the IF. To our credit, we bypassed the TeamEdward/TeamJacob thing and jumped straight on to Team Jasper right from the first movie.

The actor, Jackson Rathbone, also appealed greatly. He’s insanely multi-talented and was part of a band called 100 Monkeys while filming The Twilight Saga. They played where-ever he was filming and recorded albums too. I own two of them. I do wish I’d had a chance to see them play live.

So, we are past our mid-life crisis but while the madness has died down, we still have our fangirlyness keeping us feeling young and vibrant, even when the joints creak and a weekend spent at a fan convention knocks us about for the next week. I still have a rotating list of favourites, with no one in particular occupying a top spot for long. Never restricting myself to only actors and musicians, I have particular favourite sports stars – Rafa Nadal is my number one tennis player, and Collingwood being my favourite football team, I have a list of players who might make the IF babble incoherently, should she ever meet them. The reason the IF amuses me so much right now?? I went to see The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones movie. I’d read the book and was looking forward to seeing my current favourite crush, Aiden Turner on the big screen playing a werewolf.

I knew the guy playing the lead role. His name is Jamie Campbell Bower; I’ve seen him before, in the Twilight movies and as King Arthur on TV. I’ve been following him on Twitter for a couple of years. I thought he might be ok as Jace in this movie series. But I wanted to see Aiden. I had the cinema to myself. I was alone. I’m fairly sure the IF made a very audible noise when Jamie appeared. Aiden? Aiden who?* That earth/axis/shift thing happened… again… I so do not need another crush! Excuse me; I have to check my Twitter feed now to see what Jamie is up to…..

*You know I don’t really mean that. I rarely give up one crush for another. Sometimes they just fade into the background. Aiden is still there round the top of my list. Who knows how long the Jamie crush will last anyway? The second Hobbit movie is due out soon and there’s lots to love about that! Lee Pace, Orlando, Richard Armitage, oh yeah and Aiden too, playing an arrow shooting dwarf, what’s not to love about that???