Here’s a little peek at some writing I’ve been working on for the book proposal.

…We are absolutely full of shit when we go on like this, and we both know it. My academic posturings simply don’t hold up. I can list as many culture critique missives as I want. The truth remains that my first arena concert was New Kids on the Block.

My best friend, Suzna, and I convinced her bemused professor mother to drive us an hour south of the Island to the show at the Tacoma Dome. While Suzna’s mother waited in the car for three hours (no doubt wondering what she did wrong), Suzna and I crawled directly into the belly of the boy band, teenie bopper pop beast, ignoring the curled smoky exhalations of plastic-wrapped taste manufacturing and merchandise tie-ins.

At 13, we were already far too old for the concert. We found ourselves surrounded by screaming 11-year-old girls who seemed to be speaking a different language. (Don’t be fooled: the two years between 11 and 13 constitute an age difference that spans great yawning canyons of physio-emotional development — for God sake, we’d gotten our periods. We swore constantly. We has long theological discussions about prolapsed rectums. By puberty standards, we might have well have been cashing in our 401ks, we were so on top of our teenager shit.)

Our disdain for the girls around us was interrupted by a 10 year old who leaned over and asked, “Who are your favorites?”

Suzna and I were only vaguely familiar with the members of the band, but we knew hair color and their names. “Uh, Jon,” I said, carefully adhering to my middle school trend of crushing on boys who were the most boring, so that I could project all my wildest fantasies on them. Susannah picked Joey, the youngest member.

Our answers seemed to please the girl. “I like Donnie,” she informed us down her nose. “He’s the bad boy.”

The lights went down, the karaoke track cued up, and the boys came out and danced and sang into their microphones. Within minutes, Suzna and I found ourselves screaming for our favorites, even bickering over who looked cuter. Despite being only superficially familiar with the band when we entered the arena, by the concert intermission, we were howling the names of our NKOTB boyfriends at the top of our lungs, and dancing awkwardly around our plastic arena seats. I was doing my trademark 1988 move called The Squidly Diddly, and it involved holding my legs together, bending my elbows outward and snapping my fingers — a strange imitation of the dance my father does when he bends his arms out, smiles broadly, and wiggles his pointed index fingers as he trots in circles.

(Excuse me for a moment while I get lost on the dark dance floor of the father/daughter prom, caught in the swirl of middle aged men and their awkward pubescent girls. The prom where fathers and daughters awkwardly poke their elbows out and celebrate their dinnertime coup of mocking their wife and mother about calling “The State” to turn her in — a cruel joke, in light of family history. Ah, the father/daughter prom, where no threatening evil hormone-addled young men are allowed to tread. The father/daughter prom, where generations of Oedipal issues are dashed by a shared giggle over mom’s ugly new perm. Where every table features napkins from lunch bags, each with a handwritten note and a squiggly-mouthed smiley face. Best imaginary prom ever.)

Despite Suzna and I not much liking NKOTB when we went to the show, we went to feel a part of something — and we were not disappointed. There in the arena, faces lit by the swirling stage lights and strobes during “Hanging Tough,” my best friend and I found pieces of ourselves in everyone else. Who cared if our affections were genuine. We were tapping into a culturally accepted form of young female lust, and it was intoxicating.

We certainly weren’t tapping into anything at home — being a fan of pop music in grunge-era Seattle was a culture crime of the highest degree. But Suzna and I weren’t looking to be cool with our local peers — we wanted meta-peers. We were looking to commune with the nation, coming together in debates over who was better: the cute one or the sensitive one. We escaped our alienation and found that for that 90 minutes when we were screaming the names of boys we didn’t know, there was a sense of being tapped in. A jolt of cultural currency that tingled in places we were just learning to identify.