So...

I was fourteen and a resident of a Boston suburb in 1990. As such, I loved me some New Kids on the Block. The confluence of events that brought them into my life at that moment was like a perfect storm of hormones and bubble gum music and I really can't remember anything before or since that inspired that sort of frantic excitement in me. The pure thrill that would buzz through me at the merest sighting of them on TV or a snippet of one of their songs on the radio, or a picture in a magazine...it was intoxicating. Don't even get me started on what it was like when my uncle got me an autographed picture of Joey McIntyre (my chosen favorite)...I was delirious.

My friends and I shamelessly stalked these people, along with God knows how many other girls our age. We were known to do ridiculous things like insist upon driving by Joey's house on the way to one friend's asthma doctor. (Yea. We went to the doctor with her just so we could drive by his house.) Once, when we were going to a concert, we set all the clocks in that same friend's apartment ahead an hour so we could leave earlier. People got to their concerts HOURS ahead of time, hoping for a sighting. Also, that friend's mom should probably be canonized, just for what she had to put up with from our 14 year old selves. She was the first adult I swore in front of, when the Pay Per View feed we were enjoying from six inches away momentarily froze in the middle of the introduction to a concert. Yes, you read correctly. The actual concert hadn't even begun yet.

My poor sister was 20 years old and came home from college to a room absolutely COVERED in images of these people in whom she had no interest. I had removed her beloved Jon Bon Jovi in favor of my beloved Joey. She was outraged, clearly. So saturated was she (unwillingly) in these images that she was known, on occasion, to dream of the fellas. Unlike me, however, she did NOT awake devastated that the dreams had ended. Go figure.

My Dad was the most supportive of my fandom. He bought me all the New Kids CD's. He bought me my concert tickets. Once, he even bought me my OWN Pay Per View concert. My Mom was...displeased, to say the least - mainly because I had a date on the night of the concert, so wasn't even home to watch the thing, meaning she and my Dad had to tape it for me. Naturally, after an evening of feigned indifference of all things New Kids, I RAN home and watched the tape, in its entirety, twice.

By the time they released their last album in 1994 (which, of course, my Dad brought home to me the day it was released), I was a senior in high school and had largely moved on musically to the more timely and hip likes of R.E.M. and Pearl Jam. I was curious enough about the album to give it a few listens, hoping to find some of the magic I remembered form four years earlier. But...that album just wasn't all that good, much as it still pains me to say it. That, combined with my 18 year old self consciousness over actually liking a (gasp!) boy band in the mid-nineties was enough to cause me to turn my back on my idols. A sad day, indeed.

Now, here it is in 2008, and the New Kids are reuniting. And I have to admit, it's pretty enjoyable. It's not as heady as it was 18 years ago. It couldn't be. I have more life experience and fewer hormones raging through me. But it's oddly comforting to see them on my TV once again, to remember how much joy they brought me at a pivotal moment in my life, to remember how daydreaming about Joey McIntyre afforded me an escape during some tough times. I'm hardly a 14 year old girl. I'm a wife and a mother. And I'm hardly going to plaster posters on my walls. I have actual art (apologies to Lynn Goldsmith - I do not mean to imply that your lovely book was not actual art). But I will surely go to see them perform, and remember that time Joey TOTALLY looked right at me from the stage of Worcester Centrum, back in 1990.