Summer 1985 marked the first anniversary of my family’s return to Baltimore from Saudi Arabia, and of my experiment in trying to become a normal American teenager.

It wasn’t going well.

My years removed from popular culture and my frantic attempts to immerse myself in it had turned me into an exchange student in my own country. The music I liked — 1960s oldies and British New Wave — were, it seems, too weird, too white, too … much for a lot of the kids I had grown up with in Maryland. This had made eighth grade kind of hairy for me, and I had no reason to believe high school would be better.

So the pressure was on when, on a sticky summer day before school started, my twin sister, my best friend and I dodged traffic to get to Caldor, a now-closed department store. We ran up to the record department (yes, records). We were each going to pick out a 45 (yes, 45s) to play on the old-as-us stereo Lynne and I had inherited from our folks.

Lynne chose New Edition’s Mr. Telephone Man. Nikki got the Commodores’ Night Shift. I probably wanted a Monkees record, but my plan was to force myself to buy something from 1985.

And then I saw Madonna, staring seductively from the paper cover of Crazy for You, her blond frizz and 30,000 bangles backlit in blue.
I didn’t even like Madonna that much — I was a prudey 14-year-old and she sort of scared me. But I loved that song. There was a tentativeness to her singing. She sounded unsure, like she was dying to get up the nerve to be herself, to meet someone who understood her. Madonna got it! She got me.

Now, of course, I know Crazy for You is about a sleazy hookup. But in my mind it will always be the ballad of an awkward 14-year-old hoping that, on the other side of that summer, somebody was going to look across a room and find me not-weird-enough to get to know.