O Pioneer: My Brush with Greatness, Before the 'Ness Set In

In the third grade I acquainted myself with a little lady who wore a Dorothy Hamill haircut (it was the late seventies, her 'do was hot, we all wanted it, that's all I'm sayin') and sang all of the words to "You Light Up My Life," a highly popular song at the time. (Google it if you don't believe me.)
She was red-headed, cute as a button, friendly, outgoing, and smiled with dimples as deep as ditches. She was my eight-year-old real-life-girl idol. Shaun Cassidy who??
I wanted to be Betty to her Wilma. (Another retro reference. Yeah, yeah, I'm aged.)
In gym one day I made her laugh, my First Stand-Up Routine. The subject: popcorn. I made her snort. That was my First Atta Girl in my "Atta Girl, a Permanent Record of Personal Achievement and Yay Me Stuff."
Also a First, I discovered the joy of making other people, those who weren't my mother, laugh. (My mother's laugh has always been an auditory drug to me. To make her laugh I will do most anything, and the elation I get from her joy is a high that's impossible to deny.)
One sunny rainbow-strewn day this lovely classmate invited me to her home for my First Outside-the-Neighborhood After School Play Date, a term that I believe did not come into fashion until recently. (Yes, yes, we were ahead of our time. Insert falsely modest downturned eyes, and applaud if you wish.).
Agog, I went to her home on my First Ever School Bus Ride, another blog entirely, one focusing mostly on odor.
In her enormous home, her room was actually two rooms: an enormous bedroom and a playroom as large as my entire home, garage included. I was in My First Mansion.
When I got home that evening, after a fantastic day of dining on the First Kid Cuisine ever invented (I'm sure it was, trust me) and floating in lovely glittery illusions only an eight-year-old with her First Heterosexual Girl Crush can invent, I wanted to move to her neighborhood.
Instead, only a few short months later, we did move. To a new school district.
Aaargh.
Crushed. Downtrodden. With hair much too thin to support my own anemic version of the Hamill bob, I moved.
The name of this eight-year-old young lady I emulated at will: Ann Marie Smith. 
When I saw her again in high school, she was Ree, and she was lithe and graceful and oh-so-popular and I had reached critical point-of-no-return geekiness, so of course I never spoke to her.
She was my brush with greatness. I thought she was great then, but now the world has been put on notice that this chick is to be heard.
Now she is Ree Drummond, http://www.thepioneerwoman.com/, an entrepreneur, a chef, a teacher, a performer, a photographer, and soon to be a fifty-foot-tall star of the big screen of moviedom
I suggest you check her website and peruse it a while.
I wish she would post pictures of her childhood bedroom. Sigh. I'm sure it's as glorious as I remember, 'cause little girls never exaggerate in their memories...right?