New Kids on the Block

The year is 1990 and I have just experienced my first true love..... Joey McIntyre of the New Kids on the Block (aka NKOTB).... I just thought he was awesome when I was 12, 13, etc... somewhere around there.

It's January and NKOTB is coming to Nashville in February... oh I want to go so bad.... Y107 the radio station in Nashville was giving tickets away and I was always listening to the radio, trying my hardest to be that 7th caller to win my tickets to the concert! It was a Wednesday night and off to church we went.... me with a bag of smarties to share with class and a little disappointed that I couldn't stay home and listen to the radio to try and win... Into Ms. Joy's 7th/8th grade class I went with my smarties and there is this girl there that I sent down next too and we strike up a conversation, first about the smarties and then the talk turns to my true love...... Joey... and her true love Jordan and from that point on we have been unseperatable...... Her name is Shelia and she is my best friend.........

I don't know if you'd really call what Shelia and I had for the boys of NKOTB love or just pure obsession like a lot of the other 12, 13, 14 year old girls in the world at that time but Shelia and I had everything they possibly made with the guys of NKOTB on it...... not until recent with Hannah Montana have I seen any other artist(s) have so much stuff out with their name or image on it...

I had the sheets, the sleeping bag, tons of t-shirts and posters, the hats, the buttons, both big and small, the dolls, the poseable figures, the tapes (yes I said tapes) and then eventually the cds, cups, books, numerous video tapes and the list could just go on and on and on......

Now my parents wouldn't let me plaster my walls with the posters, only allowing a few, but Shelia's parents let her basically wallpaper her walls with I think every poster they ever came out with...

It was awesome, we were in love for the first time (thankfully we did didn't love the same boy) and dreamed of going to the concert together....... but the concerts would sell out before we could even get tickets so then we would spend hours reading the classifieds looking for some reasonably priced tickets and praying our parents would get us the tickets and let us go.

Well we didn't find aany reasonably priced tickets to buy so unfortunately we didnt' get to go to the February concert... but just a few short months later... they announced they were coming back to Nashville... WHOO HOO we were getting a 2nd chance to go.... We were so excited!!!

Once again though we didn't get to get tickets from ticketmaster because they sold out so quickly..... so the search began again...but this time it had a different outcome...

My daddy was able to get 2 tickets for me to go to the concert... only 1 problem.... I was 13 and she was 14 and they were not going to let us go together.... no matter how much begging pleading, fussing we did... it just wasn't happening (you that was back in a time where parents didn't just drop their kids off at that age to run around unsupervised)...

So my Aunt Gigi took me to the concert at Starwood and it was GREAT!!! And we assumed that they'd be back and the next time Shelia and I would get to go together....

But would you believe that it took 19 years for that to happen? Yes it's true, it took 19 years for us to be able to go together and we went (thanks to Shelia) this past Monday, March 16, 2009 and it was AWESOME!!! Way better than the first concert!!!! I had not heard a lot of the songs in a long time but the words came back to me just like it was yesterday... The audience was full of women around my age and when they started performing we all morphed back into 12, 13, 14 year old girls screaming for our first love!! Joey, Jordan, Donnie, Danny and Jon..

They put on an awesome concert for over 2 hours and it was well worth the wait... Now we just need to get some more tickets and a road trip needs to be planned!!!!

here are some pictures that I snagged from another friend that had even better seats than we did.