David Cassidy in the News
Little Voice Told Her That Idol Is Back
November 10, 1990
By Amanda Barrett
The Orlando Sentinel
Something caught my ear the other day when my favorite pop station played a typical '90s, overproduced-with-a-little-voice pop song: The little voice sounded familiar.
Could it be, I thought? David Cassidy?
The announcer confirmed that Cassidy had a new album out and was staging a comeback after disappearing from the music scene for almost 15 years. The song was ''Lying to Myself.''
How many other women in their 20s would be rooting for him to make it big again, I wondered.
I got an inkling after it was announced that he would appear in tonight's Light Up Orlando street festival. A chief topic of conversation among my friends and me became how early in the afternoon we'd have to get downtown to be closest to the stage.
When we were in elementary school, my girlfriends, my three sisters and I had one thing in common: We loved David Cassidy.
Though I was only 6 years old at the time, with a pixie haircut and horn-rimmed glasses, I was convinced that if I ever met him he would fall deeply in love with me.
As every woman between the ages of 25 and 35 remembers, he played Keith on The Partridge Family, which first aired in 1970.
Sandwiched between The Brady Bunch and Room 222 every Friday night, The Partridge Family was the perfect show for a 6-year-old who found the Brady Bunch incredibly prissy and knew that no schoolteachers were as hip as the ones on Room 222.
The Partridge Family premise was simple: A widow and her five kids formed a pop band that traveled by a school bus (''a psychedelic-painted happening on wheels,'' Tiger Beat called it) to various gigs.
No matter where the family bus journeyed, it always seemed to arrive at the same place. I could never figure out why the Partridges always sang at the same nightclub to the same faces.
None of that mattered as long as I could look at David Cassidy. His only real challenger for my prepubescent heart was Bobby (''Julie, Do Ya' Love Me?'') Sherman, but at 25, he was just too old.
Cassidy was 17 when the show began and had canyon-deep dimples, twinkling gray-blue eyes and shiny brown shagged hair that fell ever so softly to his shoulders.
Did I mention that he sang?
''I Think I Love You,'' he sang soulfully. ''I Think I Love You.''
I knew he was singing those words just to me. I checked. No matter where I moved in the living room, his eyes always were on me.
I remember once desperately searching through the phone book under ''C,'' for Cassidy. When my mother asked what I was doing, I told her I was going to call David Cassidy.
She gently explained that since I was looking in a directory for Kissimmee and St. Cloud, I probably was not going to find his number. It might be better to write him a letter, she suggested, or, better yet, join his fan club. And so I did.
For $2, I got a secret Partridge Family decoder ring, wallet-size photos, stickers and ''a groovy stuffer letting you in on all exclusive Partridge family surprises.''
The surprise was on me when I learned by reading the ''stuffer'' that only Shirley and David were singing, not all six Partridges. And none of them were playing their own instruments.
Even now when I put on a Partridge Family album - say, Sound Magazine or Shopping Bag - I get goose bumps listening to ''Point Me in the Direction of Albuquerque,'' and I wonder if those 13-year-olds who are gaga over The New Kids on the Block will be getting goose bumps 20 years from now when they hear ''The Right Stuff.'' When they think of their childhood, will they feel about New Kids on the Block the way I've felt about David Cassidy?
Even though the Partridges left the air in 1974, David has never really left my heart. I've been thinking about Light Up Orlando and the new David Cassidy, dressed in black, with graying hair. I think I want the old one - forever young and dressed in his red velvet stage outfit, singing ''I Think I Love You.''
I'll probably stay home.
