National Day of Hero Worship

Most people, when asked who their heros are, will name someone like their Mom or their Dad, or their Great-Aunt Judy who rode her bike from Austin to Little Rock 45 times in one year just cause somebody told her she couldn't do it. I, also, am a big fan of my parental units (HUGE FAN!), I admire them tremendously, and they are indeed my personal heroes. But when I was a kid, I often looked elsewhere for inspiration, for role-modeling, and for guidance. You want to know who my heros were?

1. Davy Crockett. I dreamed of being a wilderness explorer, and plus his picture on the cover of his biography was CUUUUTE! In my games I often pretended I was Davy Crockett, tramping around the vast unexplored American West with a rifle, a Bowie knife, and a coon-skin cap. No doubt the romanticized version of his life I read as a kid left out the less-than-savory aspects of his character, but to me he was the very spirit of adventure.

2. Amelia Earhart. I know, I'm not the only one. But seriously, this woman was amazing. I read her biography, too, and I read a passage that described her running in to a meeting with "windblown hair." I had no idea that was merely a polite way of saying "messy." I thought that if your hair was in the wind enough it would take on some fantastic qualities that were immediately identifiable as "windblown," and furthermore, it must be extravagantly romantic to have windblown hair. God bless my mother, who never asked why when I spent the next six months hanging my head out the windows of moving cars.

3. Claire Huxtable and Julia Sugarbaker. You know them, right? The mother on the Cosby Show, and the main character on Designing Women? God bless women who know how awesome they are, and aren't afraid to tell it like it is. While I can occasionally approximate eloquence in the written word, when it comes to spontaneously expressing my thoughts verbally I am at a complete and total loss. If one day somebody thinks even in passing that I am one-tenth as cool as either of these fictional characters, I will faint dead away with glee.





The following link will take you to the greatest Julia Sugarbaker moment of all-time, though embedding has been disabled (bummer):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVl4bmGcn3c

So what about you all? Who were your heroes (non-familial) when you were growing up? Who did you intentionally model yourself after? Why? Tell me all about it, or write a post on your blog and then let me know to go read it!