My disclaimer:

It is not my intent to slander or bash pop stars. Nor is my intention to mock religion. Also, I know that I'm missing hyphens. I've become hyphen-phobic, as of late, and don't feel like looking up all the words that I think may be hyphenated.

And so we proceed:

The word on the street is that The New Kids on the Block are working on a reunion. There is an official website. Besides, the eldest must be forty -- one must spread out their youth as much as possible.

I have a confession to make. I have actually been thinking about these fellows for the last few weeks and how to post about them. Though it is true that, unlike most of the other females of my generation, they were not the impetus to awaken my sexuality (that honor belongs to this this hawt skinny brit with eyeliner and gravity defying hair), they were a major fixture of my youth.

You see, I had this friend whom we will refer to as Stacy. ¹ Stacy was convinced that she was going to marry Joe McIntyre (please don't spam me if I spelled it incorrectly). He's the little one with the way high voice. Anyway, my friend had been at a building of sacred importance to her religion and the knowledge that he would convert from Catholocism to her religion and be married to her and give her about a dozen babies (including several sets of twins) was revealed to her. And so my friend set about learning all she could learn about the Catholic religion so she could properly convert the dude with the most amazingly big hair and teeth on the planet. (As I recall his hair was bigger, but this is the pic I got.)

I was Catholic: I was her in.

From the time I was thirteen until I was seventeen and no longer a good, practicing Catholic, my friend spent many hours quizzing me about the best way to convince a dyed in the wool Catholic of their religions utter wrongness and how she could bring him to the light. I suggested not making the connection between transubstantiation and cannibalism.

For a long time I thought my friend eccentric, but as the years past it became more and more apparent that something was seriously wrong in her family. I decided that this was absolutely true the day that her mother told me that she had been waiting for Neil Diamond to come and carry her off into the sunset and onto Rodeo Drive to live a life of pure joy and bliss. ²

Now, this is some pretty funny stuff: these women in the Magic Valley of Idaho dreaming that this pop star is going to come and carry them away from their humdrum Idaho life. And they really believed it. This wasn't a fantasy. They truly thought this would happen someday if they waited long enough.

Eventually it came to light that my friend's dad had been molesting and beating his children and raping and beating his wife. (Yes, you can rape your wife. Don't argue with me.) Her mother saved for years so she could afford a divorce. I saw her mom about two years ago, she was still with Stacy's dad, and she didn't look happy. She looked even more beaten down than she had when I was a teenager. She looked so old, even though she's in her fifties.

The New Kids on the Block, like so many other pop bands, were about fantasy. They were singing only for you, thrusting their pelvises for you, waving their hind ends for you³, telling you that you and only you (and the other thousands of girls in the audience) were their favorite girl. And for that one moment, all these millions of gushing, weeping, flailing teenage girls believed that there was the just slight possibility that one of the (let's see if I can remember how this went) five bad boys from beantown land might just drive up to her door in a black tricked out Beamer and take her home to Boston, even if she lived in a small Idaho town, population 902. (And yes, I know there were a lot of guys out there who were also in love with these fellows -- they could find a New Kid on the Block at their door, too.)

And so, though I believe that this may be one of the signs of the Apocalypse, that in fact, four of these bad boys may be the four horsemen of the Apocalypse(while the fifth one is, what? A backup singer?), I also say, "Come, hither, men." (Because, even though they may -- if this is all true -- insist on calling themselves "kids" they are technically men, and were probably during most of their stardom, whether their management wanted you to know they shaved or not.) "Come and bring back the fantasy, if only for a little while. The economy sucks. The job market is pitiful. The housing market is nose diving. We are at war, people are dying, and though we may be saying it in jest, a lot of us are waiting to see what trick our current commander in chief has up his ass in preparation to prevent us from ousting him from office at the soonest possible opportunity. We won't even talk about Britney, or Lindsay, or Amy Winehouse. We need you to return and remind us of the good moments of our youth⁴. We need some synthesized New Edition rip-off pop to warm our cold evenings." Besides, they have a built-in audience. What's not to cash in on? There's probably a lot of people of a particular age who will love them forever.

And as for me? I'll be hanging with the weed in tweed. Though I may waggle my own bum if the opportunity arises.<sup>5

1</sup>Because this is what she was going to name her daughter.^a
2You know, Mr. Diamond has some big ass hair there himself. I wonder if its a family trend...
³Which, by the way, got Jarvis Cocker arrested while it only made these guys more money. The injustice of it all! I still say Jarvis should have been give the OBE.
⁴My Lord, Joe, the hair... THE HAIR! And bicycle shorts? Did your stylist have no taste???
⁵DID YOU SEE THAT BREAK DANCE MOVE??? I wonder what he's capable of in bed... Okay, I don't, but the question was begging to be asked.
^aWhich she didn't when her daughter arrived, by the way.