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"  Photo: Getty Images ELLE&amp;#039;s December cover girl Lea Michele has a rabid fan base. On her various social platforms alone, the Glee star is followed by nearly 7 million followers\u2014and that doesn&amp;#039;t include the hundreds of thousands who follow the star on numerous Tumblr fan sites. Lea&amp;#039;s admirers are so devoted that they leaked our cover the weekend before we were planning on posting it online. Yes, they&amp;#039;re that good. So it&amp;#039;s with some caution that I admit this: I&amp;#039;m one of those crazy Lea Michele fans. (I know what you&amp;#039;re thinking here but I swear I wasn&amp;#039;t the mole!) Still, the level of my fangirl goes deep. As I explained in my tribute piece to Cory Monteith (Lea&amp;#039;s late real-life and on-screen boyfriend), when she first appeared on TV for Glee, my phone buzzed with texts from friends and family as my celebrity &amp;quot;twin&amp;quot; had emerged. First of all we look alike: We&amp;#039;re petite, brown-eyed brunettes with thick, long hair and flat Jewish noses who hail from the East Coast. A friend of mine even made this Facebook photo collage of us (back in 2008):  Photo: Facebook I once got bangs inspired by her fringe cut in 2010. Obsessive, I know. But it just sort of happened.  Photo: Facebook Then there was the time I got a blowout before interviewing her (here). I had hoped we&amp;#039;d take a photo together, but my selfie request was rejected by her publicist. Fail. Regardless, I stayed devoted, buying tickets to the Glee tour at Radio City Music Hall, downloading Glee tracks from iTunes, and tuning in weekly to watch her on TV. Lea and my similarities go deeper than just looks. As Glee&amp;#039;s creator Ryan Murphy explained in Lea&amp;#039;s cover story, the role of Rachel Berry\u2014the overachieving, big-dreaming high-school theater nerd\u2014was created for Lea, based on her personality. In the feature, Lea added that in her New Jersey high school, she was on the volleyball team, debate team, went to summer camp, and attended her prom and graduation, etc. This basically describes my childhood but swap singing aspirations for dancing ones and add in the model UN club, student congress, dance team captain\u2014and yes, I spent seven summers at sleep-away camp. Yet the qualities that make Lea inspirational to me\u2014the drive, the talent, her incredible stage presence\u2014make her, well, annoying to some (like any major celeb, she has her share of haters). Lea can evoke that &amp;quot;Anne Hathaway syndrome&amp;quot;\u2014the actress who is always &amp;quot;on,&amp;quot; always performing. So bubbly. So perfect. Too perfect? While I do find myself defending her at dinner parties, I&amp;#039;m not at all ashamed or embarrassed of my Lea worship. Lea went for her dreams, and she got them. And I did, too. (My first internship ever was at ELLE when I was 18, and ever since, I had wanted to work here more than anything). But I don&amp;#039;t just love Lea because she&amp;#039;s successful: I admire her because she&amp;#039;s a positive influence on young women. As Murphy said, she is the heart and soul of Glee\u2014a show devoted to giving young people who don&amp;#039;t usually have a voice, very powerful (often singing!) voices. She&amp;#039;s okay with being different and has openly stated that she&amp;#039;d never get a nose job just to fit into Tinseltown\u2014it might also mess with her vocal chords. Those singing skills are her biggest claim to fame (&amp;quot;She has that once-in-a-generation voice,&amp;quot; according to Murphy). Whether Lea belts out a Barbra Streisand or Katy Perry hit, she does it fully and with conviction, and she lets other petite brunettes out there know that if they follow their heart and work harder than the girl next to them, they may achieve stardom, too. Most of all: Lea doesn&amp;#039;t break under pressure. She never fell off the bandwagon like other young, once-wholesome stars (Lindsay Lohan, Miley Cyrus, Amanda Bynes); she&amp;#039;s never used her fame to just get attention (there are no DUIs or photos of her dancing drunkenly on tables circling the Internet). Lea keeps it classy. As she publicly grieves for Cory, she&amp;#039;s still thinking about how she can help others. As she said in her ELLE cover story: &amp;quot;Now that I am in this position, you can choose to rise, and that&amp;#039;s what I&amp;#039;m going to try to do. I know that Cory would want nothing more than for me to take this situation and use it to help people.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s why I&amp;#039;m a Lea Michele fangirl. And if you need more convincing, just listen to the girl sing\u2026                                                             "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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