Hopelessly Devoted

So, Olivia Newton-John passed away last week. And I promise, I’m not going to do that thing other people do, where they gnash their teeth and rend their garments and declare how completely and utterly devastated they are, then sit in sack cloth and ashes for seven days like they’re sitting shivah for their mother.

Like, I’m bummed. Fuck. Olivia Newton-John died and cancer can suck my ass, but people really take it too far when someone famous dies. But that’s another essay for another time.

So, while I’m not wallowing in my grief, her death still hits. When you’re a kid, there are certain reference points, and they stay with you the rest of your life. And because you’re a kid and your world isn’t really that big, your reference points tend to be movies or TV shows or songs. Because those are easy. Like, they’re right there, so you grab the ones you like, and you try not to let go, but kids don’t like to be made fun of, so when people start making fun of us for liking certain people or certain things—well, maybe we don’t completely let them go, but we definitely shut up about them for a while.

Olivia Newton-John was kind of everywhere when I was a kid. My cousin Marietta was obsessed with her and had all her albums (the vinyl ones, yes), so when my mother needed time for herself (and whichever guy she was seeing at the time), she’d off-load us at Aunt Etta’s house and we’d spend a long weekend surrounded by the chaos of a family with eight kids. There were only four of us, so the Davis home was like one of those foreign countries where the people spoke the same language we did, but the customs were different. Like, the Davis kids would declare, totally out of the blue, that there was a talent show and everyone would be in it! And then, literally, they would all have their numbers and routines ready to go. Like they were some vaudeville family, always ready to perform at the drop of a hat. I was caught off guard by it, so the only thing I can remember doing for one of these shows was fumbling my way through “You Don’t Have To A Star (To Be In My Show)” by Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis, Jr., and doing both parts just because it was the only song I knew all the words to when I was nine years old. And, luckily, my cousin Sandra (Marietta’s older sister) had the 45.

But, yeah. Olivia Newton-John was like air when I was a kid. She was just there, and if she hadn’t been there, life would have been a lot different. I used to hear her on the radio and see her on television, singing the songs I’d heard her sing on the radio, but when Grease dropped in the summer of 1978 and “Summer Nights” was playing every time you turned the radio on, I started to become aware of her in ways I hadn’t before. Then I saw Grease and that did it.

And I’m not going to wax philosophic about the movie, because I think we all know it’s not really as great as we think it is, because when we were kids and saw it, things were so much more to our tiny, developing brains than they would be when we revisited them in our teens and twenties and onward. And actually, while certain songs from it would literally never not be the gold standard (“Hopelessly Devoted To You” slaps to this day), there was a period in my teens, in the 1980s, where anything and everything of the 1970s just wasn’t cool, and so Grease kind of lingered in the shadows. Off in the wings, stage right. Remember, too, that the 1980s gave us Grease 2, which I actually prefer to the original (but I won’t go into why here). And the entire decade moved at warp speed through so many themes and music genres and hairstyles that we all kind of woke up in 1989 when Metallica released that black album like “Wait. It’s 1989 already?”

I rewatched Grease for the first time when I was twenty, when I moved in with a particularly boring guy who was fourteen years older than me and lied to myself that it was what I wanted and needed at that point in my life: stability, a mature and professional boyfriend who made a lot of money, out of my mom’s house. You know, the basics.

By that time in my life, I’d seen the movie about ten times and had even seen a horrible community college production of it, but it took having lived a bit to see what Olivia Newton-John represented to legions of little gay boys (and my cousin Marietta) who’d grown up listening to and watching her. She wasn’t just a celebrity. She wasn’t just an icon. She wasn’t just a fashion statement. No, Olivia Newton-John’s Sandy was a fucking beast and here’s why: because Danny Zuko wasn’t worth a shit and she knew that, but she decided he was the one she wanted and she set out to get him. AND THEN SHE GOT HIM. And if that isn’t every little gay boy’s first fifteen unrequited love affairs in elementary and middle school, into high school (with, perhaps, a bit of reciprocation from that woofy ginger football player with blue eyes… but I digress), and on to college where of course you pick the worst possible guy to throw yourself at, then I don’t know what is.

But no. Sandy changed Danny Zuko. And, yeah, okay… we don’t know what happened after they flew away from the carnival and into the clouds, but that’s not the point. Olivia Newton-John’s Sandy gave a blueprint to every little gay boy who dreamed of going on a date with the boy they liked, of kissing him, of dancing with him at prom, and of finally convincing that boy they were worth changing for. I was so shook at twenty years old rewatching Grease that I had to turn the movie off and just sit there. It helped that I’d dropped acid, granted. But man, that was the moment Olivia Newton-John stopped being this pink cheeked, sunny blonde chick from the 1970s and became a goddess, at least for me.

So, yeah, her death hits. And cancer still fucking sucks. And we’re all reminded of our mortality again, but not the way we are when older celebrities go. And it was no surprise that cancer is what took her in the end. She’d battled it for years. But I’d always thought that if anyone could beat cancer, it would be the girl who could get Danny Zuko to stop being such a prick.