Month: October 2019

Wedding in Malibu, keynote in St. Louis

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in the early 1980s, teenage girls around the world fantasized about marrying Rick Springfield. That possibility disappeared in 1984 when he got married (35 years ago tomorrow). However, although it’s not an option to get married TO Rick Springfield, a couple has gotten married BY Rick Springfield.

When RS mentioned at a recent concert that he is now ordained to officiate at weddings and was going to marry his guitarist George Nastos, I thought he was joking and replayed the video (it was posted on FB) a couple more times to make sure I heard it correctly.

As discovered after some RS sleuthing on social media, he wasn’t joking. This past week, he officiated at the wedding of Nastos and his beautiful bride, which was held in the backyard of the Springthorpes’ Malibu home.

Best wishes to the newlyweds, may they have a happy life together! (And Happy Anniversary to the Springthorpes!)

Providing inspiration in St. Louis

A few days before the wedding, RS performed a few Stripped Down shows with Richard Marx and after the wedding, he headed to St. Louis, where he was the keynote speaker at a Missouri Coalition for Community Behavioral Healthcare conference. He shared his personal experience about living with depression and provided inspiration and encouragement for those who are suffering with it.

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Providing support in Canada

If being a rock star who officiates at weddings and inspires others by sharing his challenges isn’t enough awesomeness for one post, he also lent his song “Saint Sahara” from the “Venus in Overdrive” album to an annual Childhood Cancer Canada fundraiser for childhood cancer that his good friends Shantelle and Yannick Bisson are involved with.

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It’s so heart-wrenching to think of the loss of all these beautiful children and what their families must have gone through. Each picture represents a heartbreaking loss for a family. (To learn more about Sahara, click here.)

Although life can be distressing and challenging at times, it’s comforting to know that there is also a great deal of beauty and goodness out there in the world, too, with people working to bring light into the world and helping others.

Rick Springfield fans raise $34,170 for the dogs

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The final total is in for the fan-led Rick Springfield Birthday Campaign: $34,170!

It’s pretty incredible when you think about it – a group of Rick Springfield fans who I’m sure already have very busy lives take on this huge responsibility of raising funds in honor of their favorite rock star’s birthday.

They’ve done this each year since 2007 – 13 years in all, raising a total of $156,730.52. The totals of previous years ranged from $2,500 back in 2008 to $18,666 in 2015 so this year’s campaign really blew all the others away! This year’s donations, raised from July 26 to Sept. 27, all went to Linda Blair’s Worldheart Foundation, which helps rescue dogs.

(Here’s a post from 2017 that goes into more details about the campaign: “Over 100K raised through Rick Springfield birthday campaigns.”)

Not only did they promote it through a website they created, as well as social media channels, they also sold birthday campaign T-shirts and coordinated a whole prize-giving campaign that involved lots of other generous fans who donated prizes. I’m excited to say that I received a prize this year! My prize relates to a period of RS’s career that I’m not that familiar with so I’m especially excited to learn more about it. I’ll share more about it when I receive it, since I don’t think I’ve addressed it much in this blog.

(Congrats to the grand-prize winners of the dinner with RS and the original drawings!)

The contest organizers have mentioned that this will be the last year they run this campaign to this extent so I just wanted to say THANK YOU to them for making the RS birthday season so fun for fellow fans!

Photo courtesy of the Rick Springfield Birthday Campaign