Journalist Jancee Dunn admits it: She has been obsessed with rock star Stevie Nicks ever since highschool. “I listened to Stevie’s music for hours and hours and hours,” she stated. “I tried to dress, in an ill-advised moment, like Stevie! And she’s just kind of bound up in my early years in a way that is really intense and deeply personal.”
The years flew by, however her emotions by no means light. So, think about her pleasure when, in 1997, Harper’s Bazaar assigned her to interview Stevie Nicks at her California house!
Dunn started prepping instantly, rehearsing in entrance of a mirror how she would say “Hell-o, Stevie.”
Did Nicks perceive what a fan she was? “I kept it together so I wouldn’t creep her out; I don’t think she fully knew what a fan that I was,” she stated. “I knew to kind of pull it back!”
The interview even featured a surreal tour of the rock star’s closet, crammed with capes she had worn on stage and her well-known platform boots. Dunn stated it was, indubitably, one of many happiest afternoons of her life. Her solely memento: A treasured autographed T-shirt that she shops folded in a particular place in her closet.
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Asked if she ever although, This is enjoyable, that is nice, however Stevie’s only a individual like me, Dunn replied, “No! No, why would I think that? It’s Stevie Nicks! Never did I think that, because it’s not true. She’s different. She’s otherworldly.”
Sociologist Kerry Ferris, a professor at Northern Illinois University, says our pleasure over celebrities stems from them embodying issues that we would like for ourselves: “They have some combination of talent and good looks and wealth and renown,” she stated.
Ferris has a database of dozens of superstar encounter tales: “There’s a whole sort of category of encounters that involve physical contact, and fans really get excited about that: ‘I touched so-and-so.’ ‘I gave them a hug.’ ‘I shook their hand.’ ‘I sat next to them on the bus.’ And then, they get off the bus! It’s very fleeting. But it becomes the nugget of the celebrity-sighting story.”
Ferris stated these tales usually observe a sample. First comes disbelief (Is that actually Beyoncé?), then strategizing (ought to I’m going introduce myself?), after which, typically, embarrassment! “People get really worried about how stupid they must have sounded, looked or seemed,” Ferris stated.
Psychologists check with this type of one-sided relationship as “parasocial.” University of Indianapolis professor Travis Cooper, who teaches within the philosophy and faith division, explains: “The fan is going to typically know a whole lot about the star, maybe their life history (depends on the level of their fandom). And the star is going to know nothing about that fan.”
The depth of the sensation, Cooper stated, is what makes such a relationship so mystifying. He ought to know – he is had his personal superstar encounter.
One day, to his shock, he noticed the actor Jesse Eisenberg at his native Y, an occasion he described as two worlds colliding: “I had my academic training, all that stuff kind of in my head that filters out how I see the world, all that on the one hand; and then on the other hand, I had this very visceral experience,” Cooper stated. “There was a slight embarrassment, almost a giddiness, almost a fanboy kind of reaction at some point.”
He stated he would not take into account himself a fanboy: “I’d like to not. But I feel like, in that moment, that’s kind of what happened.”
Even point out of a celeb sighting or encounter is sure to cease the dialog. “It’s a brush with a person larger-than-life,” stated Vance Ricks, a professor at Northeastern University in Boston. “And so, maybe some of the glory from that person rubs off on you.”
He says we due to this fact irrationally treasure these relationships. “It’s a little funny or ironic to call it a ‘relationship,’ when it’s so unidirectional,” he stated. “What you’re often doing is projecting a sense of being understood by that person, or of knowing about that person.”
What does that inform us concerning the human situation? “Many of us want some kind of attachment,” Ricks stated. “And in some cases, we may create that.”
Jancee Dunn felt that attachment, particularly when – after she interviewed Stevie Nicks – the rock star graciously invited her to be an in a single day home visitor. “I thought, ‘Okay, should I? Shouldn’t I?’ It seemed invasive, it seemed weird. I said no, and I got in the cab. And as I’m pulling away, I mean, I couldn’t have been two blocks down the street where I thought, You idiot!”
She feels the identical remorse a long time later, and even wrote about it for The New York Times, the place she is a columnist for the Well part. “Even now, if I’m at the grocery store or the pharmacy, and I hear ‘Edge of Seventeen’ or one of Stevie’s hits, I get a pain in my heart,” she laughed.
What would Dunn like to inform Nicks right now? “Stevie, if you were to invite me over to your house again, I would happily spend the night, I would clean up in the morning, and I would be a very good guest!” she laughed.
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Story produced by Amiel Weisfogel. Editor: George Pozderec.
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