Seeing that the last post was all about the Iranian television, I thought I would write this little thing here as well.
There was this girl at our school that fancied that presenter guy that read the poems on Fridays afternoons. It took us a while to work out who she was talking about even when she first told us this because she was using his proper name while we all just knew him as the annoying presenter guy. That killed me. She must have really fancied him if she had even gone through all the trouble of finding out what his name was and everything.
Apparently his name was Mustafa something (something that I never learnt but it was ok because) straight away we all started using the nickname that this girl had very affectionately made up for him, Mosi. It was quite sad really and we used to make fun of her every time she showed us another picture of Mosi that she had so lovingly cut out from some magazine or when she told us gossip about his family life and everything. But the truth was that I was kind of jealous as well. The rest of us had crushes too but ours were on foreign movie stars or pop stars that seemed to live in a completely different world to us; people that we would probably never ever meet in our lives whereas hers was on a real person that was on our television screens every night and spoke the same language as us. Sure he was terribly annoying, pretty unattractive, wore lime-green suites with white collarless shirts and had bad hair that was cut into a bit of a mullet, but he was real and if she waited outside the Jameh Jam television building in Valiasr Street long enough (as she often did) she would be able to satisfy herself by catching a glimpse of him as he drove into work in his white Peykan.
That I thought was really something. The only time I had ever done any celebrity spotting in my whole life was once when my friends and I waited for about an hour in the hot sun to see the president of Mozambique or Tanzania or something like that go past. And he hadn’t even stopped or waved or anything. He had just shot through Tadjrish in a black Mercedes with an escort of four police cars. Thinking about it now, there is a big chance that this poor president of wherever had taken all this the wrong way and had thought that we were demonstrating against him or something. I mean I doubt this president of Mozambique or Tanzania or something had ever dreamt of getting this kind of reception in his own country even, let alone Iran. There must have been nearly a thousand people standing in Tajrish that day waiting for him to arrive.
Yes back in those days there was a serious shortage of celebrities in Iran. I mean there were some people who weren’t terrible-looking (like that horsey-looking guy that read the news and always looked like some people had taken his family hostage and had told him that they would shoot one of them every time he showed even the slightest bit of emotion) but no one you would want to idolise or throw your knickers at.
That is until the sudden appearance of Ahmadreza Abedzadeh, the Iranian football team’s invincible goalkeeper that blocked all those penalties against Saudi Arabia (I think it was). I was about thirteen then and I think every girl in our school had a crush on him.
I just want to say, ‘Thank you Abedzadeh for making the beginning of my teenage years that much more exciting.’