I’m Just Sayin’: George Michael Was Meant To Be My Husband

When I was young – as in a little child – all I kept hearing night and day was “She’s doing amazingly OK,” almost always followed by the grandiose claim “she’s a great kid, full of potential! She’ll go far in life.”

I wasn’t quite sure who my parents were talking about but I certainly wanted to meet this chap who apparently was basking in a sea of perfectness.
I’m sure you can imagine the shock when I found out they were actually talking about me. Now either I never got the memo or else, my family was collectively on crack!

Me? Fine? Hmm, not so much! Let’s be real here, how can an eight-year old kid really be fine? Do you know the mountains of insurmountable problems and colossal number of worries a child at that age has to deal with on a daily basis?
I’ll skip the part where I skim through the entire list of excruciating woes and boo boos my little eight year old self had to endure because honestly it would require writing a voluminous novel to enumerate each one of them. I’ll just sum it up by saying that they were of epic proportions which, it is safe to assume, for a kid felt monumental.

Because I grew up with an older brother – only one year my elder – who was the anointed problematic child, all of my parents’ attention constantly went to him. Now granted it was not necessarily good PR hype and certainly not anything to be overly envious of, but as Madonna once said: “bad publicity is better than no publicity.”
As a result, more often than not, I was left alone on the premise and misconceived assumption that I was doing just fine. What this did for me was catapult my ass into this crazy surreal world I creatively fabricated in my head in lieu of my own reality.
What can I say? I’m a hopeless eternal dreamer.

But looking on the bright side of things, while I may continuously be living in between two worlds – reality and fantasy – foolishly, or perhaps naively, enough, I have developed, as an instinctive mechanism to bridge this discrepancy, the skills to never take NO for an answer. That literally saved my ass as I entered the oh-so not gloriously glamorous years of my teenage life. Because evidently whatever problems I had when I was still computing my birthdays in single digits got ten times worse when I crossed over to adolescence zone.

Luckily for me that decade was the 80s – need I say more? Well, actually I do, because as much as it was the best possible time to go through puberty, it was as well the worst! No, not because of the big hair extravaganza and the wild fashion experimentations I never even attempted to keep up with, but because of the arrival of one man into my life: George Michael.

The year that marked the beginning of my end was 1984 when I first came across the music video of “Careless Whisper.”
I’m not gonna lie, I couldn’t help but cry empathizing with my future ex-husband as he was weeping his very sorry ass out because “time can’t never mend the careless whispers of a good friend” – obviously not such a good friend for telling on George! I’m just sayin’!

Unarguably, it was lust at first sight! It was then that I single-handedly discovered the literal meaning of “idol”; not only did I become a fan but an uber fanatic one too!
And if you don’t believe me, let me illustrate just how far my idolatry went.
Of course I am not talking about how overnight my bedroom became a shrine to all things Wham! and George Michael related; or how I spent hours practicing the very gay choreography of “Wake me up before you go-go” indeed donning the infamous “Choose Life” t-shirt, the luminous ripped yellow gloves and the white & blue tiny-mini shorts.

Oh no Sir–ee Bob! I’m talking about something way more outrageously out of this world than that; something that is truly the highest manifestation of the ultimate fan – that is stalking. Before you all condemningly patronize me with your “Ooh” sighs of concern, let me reassure you that I was not a psycho maniac teenager, at least not dangerously. I was just (and still am) mildly excessive, that’s all!

Because I had no filter between my real world and the delusional one enfolding in my head, back in 1986, when I found myself spending my Easter vacation at my auntie’s flat in London, I decided to put my visit with the Brits to good use. And guess what? I found nothing better but to convince my poor relative to drive me to the area George Michael’s parents lived in with the high hopes of finding Mr. & Mrs. Panayiotou’s house (that would be George’s real last name) and of course meet my man – because evidently at the height of his planetary fame he surely was still living with mommy and daddy!

How could I so audaciously dare to even attempt to pull such a preposterous stunt? Well, being such a hardcore maniac fan, I had meticulous cut out a photo of George’s parents’ residence that had been published in “Podium” (our French version of People Magazine), which also happened to mention the geographical area my Father Figure reportedly grew up in. Evidently, It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out, only an absurdly demented and very stubborn fifteen year old who just didn’t know better!

This is the part where, for strictly pure PR need to exaggeratingly hype my story, I don’t tell you that my detective work extended over two full consecutive days. And don’t ask me why or how my aunt, twice, agreed to get her ass dragged out to the suburbs of London. Seriously, in retrospect, I don’t know who was more stupid: her or I?

So, on what was technically day # 2 of our investigation, we spent an ungodly amount of time blindingly driving around that one specific area – which to protect the innocent shall deliberately remain nameless. Frankly, this was as hopeless as trying to find a needle in a haystack.

While my adorably patient auntie spent the entire day behind the wheel, I spent mine repeating like a broken record the same damned question in my, at the time, very broken English: “You know where the house for the parents of George Michael is?”

Eventually my aunt’s seemingly inexhaustible patience ran out and right around the time daylight was beginning to dissipate, she made the executive decision to call it a day. At that very moment all I wanted to do was roll myself on the floor and throw a major tantrum in retaliation but needless to say that being in a car was not conducive to successfully accomplishing an embarrassing public scene for emotional blackmail effect. That’s when I brilliantly opted to resort to plan B – namely to stop every living walking creature we’d come across on our way back to the city.

My first victim was a group of young kids stationed on bicycles at the corner of some random street. As we pulled over, I rolled down my window and went through the verbal inquisitive ritual for the oomph time. Yet this time, as luck would have it, I didn’t get the same old repetitive “dunno!” reply. Nope, this time I got specific directions on how to get from point A (where I then was) to point B (where I desperately needed to be: George’s parents’ house).

We did as instructed and minutes later found ourselves at the end of a cul-de-sac facing a big white house. A Rolls Royce was parked outside in the driveway facing the residence and standing next to it was an unidentified woman inquisitively looking in our direction, albeit exuding an air of approachable friendliness.

I stepped out of the car and proceed to walk toward her.
“Excuse me,” I casually said, “is George Michael here?”
“I’m sorry,” she tenderly answered, “George is on vacation in the South of France.”
“But I came from France,” I replied quite dumb-founded – seriously, how dared he take a vacation at the exact time I was coming to visit him? And in my home country of all places! For God’s sake, I’m his # 1 fan in the entire world; he owed it to me to be there!
“I’m really sorry darling,” she proceeded to say compassionately, “I’m his mother and I’ll tell him that a fan from France came to see him.”
“My name is Mona, tell him that please, “ I instructed her (because surely he was going to remember my name forever like one remembers the moniker Madonna or Cher).

Obviously, in spite of all my arduous efforts, I didn’t get to meet George Michael.
But the moral of the story – because, evidently, there is one – is that, to quote W. Clement Stone: “Whatever the mind can conceive, it can achieve.”

All it takes is to have “faith”!