A Teenage Love

So, I caught myself in a bit of a quandary while watching "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" on TV the other night: is it OK to check out a girl that I used to obsess over as a teenager, even though I'm 30? I'm not into that R. Kelly stuff, you know. It might be a question with no real answer.

But there's not enough time or room in Cyberspace to get into how much I used to adore Ashley Banks (played by Tatyana Ali) during my high school days. She was pretty much my favorite TV girlfriend. Ashley was smart, sensitive, rich and, obviously, a dime piece. If she was falling for Tevin Campbell, I've got to think I had a chance.

However, Ashley wasn't the only one who caught my fancy. She was No. 1 but the competition was thick. I really had some enduring crushes. Here's a rundown:

2. Lisa Turtle, Saved By the Bell: If only I could have gone to Bayside High. Then, at the least, I would have had a prom date and Lisa would have been spared from the advances of Screech. Would it have killed the writers of SBB to have had one black dude on there? I mean, didn't A.C. Slater have to hand off the ball to someone on the football team? That could have been me. And then Lisa and I could have shared a milkshake at the Peach Pit. Uh, The Max. Sorry about that.

3. Kelly Bundy, Married With Children: It's tough to resist the neighborhood floozy. Before there was Maxim magazine and Internet porn, Kelly Bundy was pretty much as sexually suggestive as it got for me in the early '90s. I definitely wasn't getting any rhythm in high school. So it was nice to think that, somehow, I could convince the dumb girl to make it happen.

4. Tiffany Warren, In The House: Goodness knows, there's no way that I could have afforded the tastes of Tiffany. She was extremely shallow. And in my senior year of high school, I drove a 1987 Honda Civic CRX with more than 100,000 miles, didn't have a job and thought I was doing it big if I took a girl to Chili's. So, in all likelihood, Tiffany would have never looked my way. But a brotha can dream.

5. Penny, Inspector Gadget: Come on. I was, like, 6 or 7. Penny was smart for her age and had ponytails. For whatever reason, I was really big into ponytails in first grade. Not to mention, she was really good with computers. We probably could have played "Oregon Trail" for hours together on the Macintosh in my elementary school's library.

Honorable mentions: Hillary Banks, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air; Punky Brewster, Punky Brewster; Maxine Johnson, Family Matters; Justine Phillips, The Cosby Show; Moesha Mitchell, Moesha.