Pop Star

From Casio keys to written dreams: how Debbie Gibson inspired a little girl to become her own kind of pop star

Photo by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash

Hey Readers,

The wait is over! Oh my, someone time travel and tell a young Sarah Crowne she’s in a Debbie Gibson video! I am beyond words excited (a feat for any writer). And that’s why, this feels like the perfect moment to share the essay below.

I wrote this three years ago and never published it. Strange that I held onto it. I guess it was meant to be, since it’s so fitting now. It’s about how an eleven-year-old girl who a Casio keyboard, big dreams, and a lot of heart found her voice.

Enjoy!

And don’t forget to watch the video at the end!

Stay Legendary Friends — you can do anything you set your mind to.

Sarah Crowne

Sarah Crowne Circa 1989.

Pop Star

By: Sarah Crowne

There’s a piano in the window. I’m eleven years old, sitting in the back seat of my mother’s used blue Mustang with the hatchback. My mother drives while my grandmother rides up front. I beg them to stop at the piano shop we pass on our way to the mall, even though I know we can’t afford one. Please, I beg. I just want to know what it feels like to play Lost in Your Eyes on a baby grand.

It’s 1989 and I’m determined about one thing, and one thing only: I’m going to be a pop star.

Picture it. Long dirty blond hair, high ponytail, fake Ray-Bans, and a little potbelly. I’m Little Miss Sunshine before she was a thing. You know, I was that girl. Big dreams and probably out of my league.

The first time I play, it’s on a Casio keyboard with mini keys. A kid at school brought one like it into music class, and I was hooked. Those drumbeats! That melody! I beg my mom to buy me one, and she does, from the local Kmart. I’m thrilled. My grandmother shows me how to play Chopsticks and teaches me about chords. I love sharing music with my grandmother. I like the way she smiles when she hits those tiny keys. We don’t always get along. She suffers from what I now know was generalized anxiety disorder, possibly bipolar disorder and early onset dementia. But at eleven years old, all I know is that seeing her smile is way better than her manic episodes.

My family isn’t typical. I live with my mother, my brother, my grandparents, and my aunt. My parents are separated, and my father, a Vietnam Veteran who was awarded a Purple Heart for saving the lives of the men in his platoon, lives in a camp trailer up the street. No one talked about PTSD back then. Instead, my grandmother says, “What’s his problem? He wasn’t in a real war.” It seems everything about him angers her. She tells me if I visit him, my mother will die. It will all be my fault. I believe her.

So, I do everything I can to escape the sadness swelling up inside me, especially when the house falls dark when my grandfather dies and my aunt is diagnosed with cancer. I play my keyboard alone in my room. I turn up the volume of Debbie Gibson’s Out of the Blue record to drown out the world. When Electric Youth is released, I play that louder. Debbie Gibson’s songs make me feel, well, electric. I’m determined to make my dreams come true.

I get a book at my school library about how to play piano. I need to learn how to play with two hands. I read it from cover to cover. When my birthday comes, I get a bigger Yamaha, with full-sized keys, complete with a stand and a pedal. “You need the pedal,” my grandmother says. Soon, I’m playing with two hands and teach myself Lost in Your Eyes. Well, at least the intro part. The truth is, I like making up my own songs more. I fill notebook after notebook with lyrics to made-up pop songs. I play melodies to go with them. I rig my radios with double cassette tapes to lay tracks, playing one tape while I play on the keyboard and record on the other. I put my tapes with handwritten letters in big manila envelopes and send them to Atlantic Records. Of course, no one calls me back. But I don’t give up. Instead, I put on my best “Debbie Gibson Hat” and, with two of my friends at school, I sing Between the Lines in a talent show. I think I’m the bomb.

When Nirvana plays Teen Spirit on MTV, I’m not ready. I’m still singing Electric Youth in my basement. I continue to play the keyboard, but soon my pop songs turn into dark, moody teen poetry. Soon, life carries me away from keyboards, but never from words. I realize I’m probably not going to become a pop star. The truth is, I can’t sing.

But I can write. My single-subject notebooks, once filled with pop songs that turned into dark, moody poetry, turn into essays, stories, and novels. Pen to paper, keypad to screen, I write and then I write some more. I win contests. My words are published. I keep going. Decades, lifetimes pass. I grow up. Get married. Graduate college. Almost die. Have children. Go to law school. Pass the Bar. Forgive my father. Make peace with my childhood, my grandmother. I write about it all. I find my heart on the page. The story is my song. It helps me make sense of the world. It helps me remember what it was like to be that little girl in the piano shop. The one who just wanted to feel what it was like to play Lost in Your Eyes on a baby grand.

Was I out of my league? Probably. Am I still? Probably. But isn’t that what being an artist is? Pushing harder when the odds are against you. Moving forward only to have “another brick fall” but keeping on because you know that “over the wall, a new world’s waiting.” I remind myself every day that my ambitions aren’t “only in my dreams” because Debbie Gibson taught me, “anything is possible”—if you “put your mind to it.”

The truth is, an artist, whether a writer, a painter, a sculptor, an actor or a “pop star” is always an artist, whether anyone is listening or watching or not. The artist keeps on seeing the world the way only they can see it, so that they can share that little piece of humanity’s story, the way only they can tell it. After all, that’s what makes artists legendary, don’t you think?

The important thing is to keep pounding those keys—the way I did that day in the piano shop when I played those first measures of Lost in Your Eyes on that baby grand.

I was already a pop star. I just didn’t know it yet.

A Busy Lady is written by an actual human—no AI, just chocolate, creativity, and a love for storytelling. This also means there may be an occasional typo, just to prove a human did it ;)

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