Daily Archives: February 5, 2006

He Let Me Have Viggo

By Geralyn Ruane

My fiancé Ron puts up with a lot from me, but I never expected him to put up with Viggo.

I am thirty-four years old; I pay taxes; I am engaged to be married. My life contains several outward signs that I am an adult. Yet I have this seriously girly celebrity crush on Viggo Mortensen – the guy who plays the emotionally scarred hero Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings movies. Sure, Viggo’s also a poet, photographer, painter, and political activist (see? here I go!) – but it’s still a celebrity crush. I buy magazines such as GQ, Vanity Fair and Cowboys and Indians when he’s on the cover (and I haven’t read magazines for fun since my subscription of Highlights ran out); I order books of his photography from Amazon; I have a “Viggo” wishlist on Tivo; I visit Viggo fan websites with alarming frequency. I haven’t acted this cuckoo since I spent my middle school library time looking up magazine articles about Duran Duran! And that was over twenty years ago! Part of me is ashamed of this gash of immaturity blazing through my life . . . but the other part will talk to almost anyone about Viggo.

But Ron is cool with it.

I could never be that way if the situation were reversed. If he were to bring home magazines with . . . say . . . Salma Hayek on the cover and visit her fan websites on the net, I’d be like, “Dude, what is up with you and Salma Hayek?”

So why isn’t Ron ticked off? I asked him that very question not so long ago. He simply said he wasn’t jealous. He knows I love him.

And he also knows that I have this tendency to obsess. I went to see Bridget Jones’s Diary in the theatre 6 times, seeing how many new allusions to Pride and Prejudice I could spot each time. When I was a Lakers fan, I owned 9 T-shirts, 4 flags on my car, 3 game jerseys, 1 ball cap, and a winter jacket – and I wanted to paint my house purple and gold. When I was crazy about the show The Crocodile Hunter, I ordered an extra pay channel so I could see one more episode a day.

Yup. I can obsess. Last year, I stood outside a Borders waiting for it to open because the first customers to buy the Return of the King DVD got a free, really HOT poster of a fierce and wild Aragorn, aka Viggo. I was the only idiot waiting, but I got my poster of Viggo! For my birthday, Ron framed that poster for me. A custom, hand-made frame that he did himself at some framing place that lets you do that. All because he knew I would love it.

Ron gets me. He knows how silly and compulsive and crazy I can be, but he doesn’t try to change me or chide me or fix me. He loves me, Viggo crush and all.

By Geralyn Ruane
Author of “Jane Austen Meets the New York Giants”
in Marlo Thomas’ book THE RIGHT WORDS AT THE RIGHT TIME, Vol. 2, April 2006