It’s taken nearly 50 years, but “Weird Al” Yankovic has finally found out his high school crush appreciated his effort to get her attention, all those years ago.
The singer, 61, took to Facebook on Tuesday with a sweet story about how he got in touch with a girl he liked in high school — and how she held on to a picture he drew of her, which he shared in his post.
Watch TODAY All Day! Get the best news, information and inspiration from TODAY, all day long.
“I was 12 years old in the 9th grade - younger than my classmates, and (as you may possibly be able to imagine) pretty awkward, shy and nerdy. And I had a crush on Patrice Y., the girl who sat directly in front of me in math class (because the seats were all arranged in alphabetical order for some arbitrary reason),” the Grammy-winning artist began.
“Of course, Patrice would never in a million years have suspected that I had a crush on her, because like I explained… painfully shy. But one day I decided I would make my big move - I decided to draw a picture of her and present her with it. But because I didn’t want to give her the impression that I LIKED her or anything, I also drew pictures of EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE CLASS and handed those out as well, just to throw her off the scent.
"(Full disclosure, I tried to make Patrice’s picture a little bit better than everyone else’s, just to be subtle about my feelings.) Anyway, everybody seemed to like their drawings, and, as you may have predicted, my love life remained completely dormant for the next several years.”
Yankovic, who was valedictorian at 16 when he graduated high school in Lynwood, California, has been married to wife Suzanne for 19 years. The couple has a daughter, Nina, 17. While he eventually found love, Yankovic wrote nothing ever came of the drawing of Patrice, until something on Twitter caught his eye.
“Okay, fast forward nearly half a century later… I’m checking my Twitter feed and I see some woman on there talking about how she used to sit in front of me during 9th grade math class,” he wrote.
“Being slightly less shy at my current advanced age, I decided to follow up on this: I DM’ed her and asked if by any chance her name was Patrice. Turns out, it was. It was her - my 9th grade crush.”
The "We're All Doomed" singer inquired about the picture.
“I then followed up and asked, ‘Hey, by any chance do you happen to remember that one time I drew pictures of everybody in class?’ A minute later she sent me this photo. She had saved it all these years.”
So, why is Yankovic sharing this story? He said he wanted to remind people that there were still some positives in what has otherwise been a tough year.
“I just felt like telling this story because, well… 2020 was arguably a pretty sucky year overall, but there were some real moments of joy sprinkled in here and there - and for me, this was definitely one of them,” he wrote.