He can actually sing!

I was born in 1967, too young to be a fan when he was at the height of his popularity in the early seventies (The Partridge Family, the TV series that catapulted him to stardom, ran from 1970 to 1974), yet I vividly remember how my heart quickened when I watched him on The Partridge Family reruns in the mid-seventies.

When I was eight, a friend and I found a stack of teen magazines in her basement. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined such fodder for my crush. His face was on every cover! Whole magazines were devoted to him! My excitement flustered me so that I had to look away from those pictures lest I burst from the thrill of it all. I didn't have the words to express what I was feeling but something told me it was naughty and way beyond my grade school years.

Today, of course, I know the word that expresses exactly what I felt: lust.

Since that fateful day a couple of months ago when thoughts of him pushed me to look him up on the web, in the words of The Partridge Family, David Cassidy has "always been on my mind". Get a life, you say? But I do have a life! Family, friends, hobbies, a house to care for, home fires to keep burning. Still, there is an indescribable compulsion to find more of him: pictures, concert footage, interviews, articles, reviews - anything and everything from his heyday - I want to see it. Just that little taste of him that day turned into an insatiable appetite.

I've checked out YouTube and have seen rare clips of him at the height of his fame and video montages lovingly created by long-time fans. I've browsed the Internet for hours collecting his pictures. I've also joined a Yahoo group where I've "met" rabid fans.

Once I started actually listening to David sing rather than just salivate before his pictures, I realized he had an amazing voice. I had no clue of this when I was a kid. I loved The Partridge Family and their music but I was too busy going ga-ga over David's looks to notice the guy could actually sing.

When I re-discovered all those old Partridge Family songs on YouTube, two things hit me: a tsunami of nostalgia and the realization that those tunes were toe-tapping, infectious little pop melodies. Pretty much all about love - the puppy, unrequited, storybook or eternal kind - never dirty, racy or dysfunctional. And then I hear David Cassidy's crooning.

That voice. Soft, honeyed, yearning, and oh, so sexy. He draws out the last word of each line like a lover's caress: lo-oooove, you-ou, ba-beee, her-rrr, shore-rrr, before-rrr....Could any other voice and phrasing be a better match for those songs?!?!? What young girl could resist that voice proposing "If you think you like what you see, how about coming along with me?... take a chance on someone who's been down"? ("There'll Come a Time" by The Partridge Family, song written by David Cassidy). His "Hello, Baby..." in "It's You" makes me weak. Eat your heart out, Jerry MacGuire.