When Ava Meyers stepped out of fourth grade language arts teacher Miriam Osborne’s classroom for an early end to the semester, she was understandably sad that she wouldn’t get to see her friends at White Rock Elementary for a while.
She was leaving a few days and a few periods early to spend two weeks in London for a family wedding over the holidays. A classroom-wide sendoff was organized to soften the blow, and on Ava’s way out the door, she got one last assignment.
“The whole class filed into the hallway,” Osborne says. “She left early, and we were hugging her and telling her goodbye, and I said, ‘Find Duran Duran’ — jokingly.”
Osborne is a diehard fan of the new wave U.K. pop band. Her classroom is decorated with Pop! Dolls of each member arranged in a pyramid by personal preference — Andy Taylor, credited with breaking up the band, is at the bottom, hidden by a desk organizer — and their second studio album, Rio, features prominently in the class record collection. There’s even a disconnected landline specially designed to receive “calls” from Simon Le Bon, Osborne’s favorite.
For a stint during the Meyers’ stay in England, the family stayed in an Airbnb in the Putney neighborhood of Central London. After visits to amusement parks, Harry Potter World, Buckingham Palace and theatrical performances, Ava’s mom, Zahra, searched for new activities to fill the time.
“I would just research what’s around this neighborhood,” Zahra says. “So when we went to Putney, it was Christmas Eve. We went to (her Aunt’s) house, and I was just Googling things to do in Putney, and the first thing that popped up was Simon Le Bon lives in Putney from Duran Duran.”
Even then, the idea of meeting Le Bon was far-fetched. So Zahra’s aunt sent out a few texts and zeroed in on an address. The original plan was just to walk by his house for the sake of simply viewing it in person on Christmas Day. That probably would have been enough for her Duranie teacher, as super fans are called, but Ava had another idea.
She and an 83-year-old relative named Nick, who apparently has courage in droves, went to the door and tried a knock. Zahra was initially hesitant but assumed Le Bon would be away on vacation, so she figured it was harmless. Le Bon’s son-in-law answered, his wife came to the door next and following a few moments getting pitched the idea by Nick, agreed to get her husband “because it was Christmas.”
Next thing they knew, he was standing in the doorway. Simon Le Bon. The tall, 66-year-old rock star was notedly kind and friendly, giving Ava a kiss on the cheek and a hug. The two took pictures, and the 10-year-old was left with a lifetime memory.
“It was super exciting,” Ava says. “I didn’t think I was actually gonna meet them. It was just like, crazy.”
The entire experience was sparked by Osborne’s love for the band. When the teacher got a text of a photo featuring her student with Le Bon, she “just couldn’t believe it” and sent the photo to all of her Duranie friends. Ava gave what she recalls as an “hour long” recounting of the story to her classmates when classes resumed in January. It was Mrs. Osborne’s idea, naturally.
Osborne’s connection to the band goes back to her childhood in El Paso in the ’80s. As the daughter of a Syrian immigrant, she says she had trouble fitting in and finding an identity. Some days, she and her brothers would travel across town to get records from a British record store.
Simon Le Bon and Ava Meyers on the doorstep of Le Bon’s home in England. Photo courtesy of Zahra Meyers.
“I tagged along and I bought my first Duran Duran record. I just used my little babysitting money, and that did it,” she says. “And so I had been a fan, literally, for 43 years, my entire lifetime. And I think part of it was because it gave me an identity for sure. Aside from just loving the music and all of that, I’m also hearing impaired, and it wasn’t caught when I was a child. And so what I’ve since learned in my lifetime is there is no better bass player than John Taylor, and Roger Taylor was incredible, and I could hear the percussion. Duran Duran is a really strong percussion band.”
Close to four decades later, Osborne has carried her passion for the band into her RISD classroom, where she’s taught for the last 15 years.
“It’s just been a fiber through my whole life story, and I think it’s a fiber that’s kind of woven into how I teach and why I teach,” she says. “And I just think we all have a connection. It’s just finding what it is.”
The first day of class is always accompanied by a lengthy, in-depth backstory on Osborne’s Duran Duran passion, which stems from a time when music streaming was unheard of and favorite bands were hobbies. She plays a different record each week for the class on her turntable. Bruce Springsteen, Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Wonder, Andrea Bocelli, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton and of course, Duran Duran have played as students work on journaling.
Osborne says that listening to albums helps her illustrate the world of storytelling to her ELA classes. Each side of an album is a chapter, every discography a novel.
Ava is now taking guitar lessons at Dallas Piano Academy, which are going “pretty well.” She and her mom give a good amount of the credit to Mrs. Osborne, who “wouldn’t take any credit for it, really.”
“Music is a connector, and it connected me to a world that I didn’t always fit in as a child,” Osborne says. “It helped me find people who I still love to this day, and it’s a big part of this classroom with me and the students I teach, because everybody has a story, and there’s something really incredible about hearing something and it taking you to a happy moment.”
“And that’s what I hope for Ava, out of all of this Duran Duran stuff, that she hears one of their songs one day and just smiles.”
