Hang with Rick Springfield? Sure, for $1,000

This, in part, is what the Internet has done — made every commodity, including the nostalgia of long-ago teenage crushes, accessible. If technology and the credit card had been available decades ago, would Clark Gable or Montgomery Clift have been available in an all-inclusive package?

Laurie Winfield, 36, has lost track of the number of times she’s seen Springfield play and spoken with him since they first met after a concert in 1997. But she says meeting him repeatedly has “enriched my life.”

“He’s so loving and he gives so much,” Winfield says. “He doesn’t get the respect he deserves.”

At 55, Springfield seems surprised that he’s still making such an impact.

“I met a couple of girls last year — two sisters who said, ‘We haven’t spoken in 20 years and we’re together tonight at your concert,” he said after a recent show at the China Club in Manhattan to promote his new album, “The Day After Yesterday.”

“I’m not saying it’s just me, but there must be something in the music that is still meaningful,” he said.

‘I'm flattered’
The Heidelbergers aren’t wistful that their untouchable crush has become a guy they see regularly. Though they now find themselves greeting die-hard fans by name, they’re hardly groupies: Suzanne, 37, is a New York real estate executive who negotiates million-dollar deals in Moscow and Frankfurt when she’s not listening to “Don’t Talk to Strangers.”

And they’re pleased to find that Springfield’s recent music is as much fun as his junior-high roller rink classics.

“We never would have bought the new albums if it wasn’t for that first concert last summer,” says Karen. “Now, they’re in our iPods.”

(The youngest of the sisters, Vanessa, 28, didnt attend Springfields concert on July 12. She was just days away from giving birth to her first child. But Karen, who’s also pregnant, has already begun gathering autographs from Springfield for the next generation of Heidelbergers.)

Springfield seems grateful that his fans still get so much out of his concerts. After every show, he takes pains to talk to them and poses for snapshots while signing autographs at the stage door.

“I meet these women, and they show me photos of when they were little kids with my posters, and they had braces and funny hair and little, skinny bodies,” he says. “And now I get to see them as adult women — intelligent, adult women — that aren’t wacky fans, that have families. I’m flattered that they’re not all loony bins looking for something to hang their hats on.”

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