Sister Scribe - the Official Site of Chicki Brown

This article was originally published in the November 2005 and September 2006 issues of Releasing Times magazine.

My Mysterious Illness

�2004 Denise V. Jones writing as Chicki Brown

All rights reserved

Two Thousand One was the year I turned fifty. It was also the year when some menopausal symptoms like heart palpitations and weird chin hairs suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Until that year my foray into “midlife� had been gradual and basically uneventful. Thankfully I had only mild hot flashes and night sweats and none of the other symptoms I’d heard so many of my fifty-something friends lamenting over.

I was working in a excruciatingly dull job as a secretary, and continuing my routine as wife, mother and grandmother when I began to experience a startling increase in my libido. This change put a smile on the face of my husband of 26 years until he realized my renewed vigor seemed to only be mentally stimulated by younger men. Suddenly I felt like an adolescent whose hormones were running rampant and found myself smack dab in the midst of a full-blown teenage crush—on a celebrity! (The strange thing is when I was actually in my teens I loved Smokey Robinson, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney of the Beatles and David Ruffin of the Temptations, but I never had a crush on any of them. I liked real flesh and blood boys.)

Here’s what happened. One weekend my brother brought over a couple of DVD’s for my husband and I to watch. He recommended one in particular, a “B� movie that I’d never heard of entitled “Pitch Black.� As I watched this movie for the first of what is now probably 30 times, I wondered if I’d been in a coma for the last quarter century. In all of the years I ‘d been married other men never turned my head. But the handsome, muscular, multi-racial star of this sci-fi thriller turned my head so hard I felt like the girl in the Exorcist. I found myself completely infatuated with Mr. Vin Diesel!

Me � an overweight, middle-class, menopausal grandmother. Now how ridiculous is that? It turned out to be quite ridiculous actually. This gorgeous young man was such eye candy to me that I found myself reverting to the juvenile habit of adorning my walls with his likeness. The movie posters in our home theater were promptly replaced with "The Fast and The Furious" and "XXX" posters, and images of the tan wonder with the mellow baritone now flashed on my computer screensaver. The Unofficial Vin Diesel Fan Club became a daily Internet stop, and I even scored passes to a private screening of “A Man Apart� where I won a tee shirt from the film.

Everyone asks me, “What does your husband think of all this?� My husband, who doesn’t like to talk anyway, hasn’t said much about it at all. In fact, he even accompanied me to the movie screening. I believe he concluded I was just two steps away from the psychiatric ward, and he was just waiting for me to snap completely so he could call the men in the white coats to come and get me. My youngest daughter, who was twenty-four at the time, was totally embarrassed at first and would wince in pain whenever I mentioned Vin’s name. My older daughter, the serious one, just shook her head and prayed for me.

In reality this little trip in fantasyland has been a shot in the arm for my imagination, something I’d thought had died decades ago. It’s been a harmless way to fantasize without actually getting into trouble. What I’ve concluded from this whole crazy experience is that I’d spent my entire adult life always doing what was proper and expected of me. I had worked diligently at being a good wife, mother, employee and church member. Unfortunately, for most of my adult life I’d made decisions based on pleasing everyone else. It had been a long time since I’d done anything crazy.

I know it sounds bizarre, but this “Vin thing� has been a personal pleasure for me. For the first time since I turned thirty I was doing something I enjoyed and didn’t care what anyone else thought about it. And it’s been a whole lot of fun. Even my family, with the exception of my sister, has come to terms with my “illness.� My daughter, the younger one, has realized my infatuation isn’t going to end the world. She bought me a new Diesel poster for the home theater for Mother’s Day!