Yeah, I listen to Boy George.  What of it?  I mean we all have our guilty pleasures in life, but that one isn’t one.  I unabashedly love Culture Club.

Alas, this entry is not about that band, but another band.  As my faithful readers may have seen, I posted a photo of New Kids on the Block’s own Joey Mcintyre, Jordan Knight and Jonathan Knight.  They were all at last nights lovely Christmas tree lighting in Boston Common.

See that those three boys were to be performing filled me with a lot of different feelings and the first, surprisingly, was not snark.  I mean yeah, maybe the 13 year old me would have snarked on those people, but this older (but probably not wiser) version of me isn’t going to snark.

Instead I’ll take you blog readers down a memory lane seldom mentioned up here.  In 7th grade, I changed schools from one I liked to one I did not like.  The one I did not like was filled with little aliens wearing New Kids on the Block t-shirts, carrying New Kids on the Block notebooks, professing their love to those people.  Embarrassingly, I had none of this gear.  And no idea who this band was.  The transition to the new school didn’t exactly go well, so whatever those people professed to like, I was going to hate.

New Kids on the Block was this crazy phenomenon, though.  Imagine waking up one day and your face and that of your close friends is literally everywhere.  But here comes the heartache part — eventually their faces weren’t anywhere anymore.  One day the New Kids t-shirts worn by my classmates got turned inside out and Eddie Vedder’s scowling mug was staring back at me from every which was.

And the New Kids disappeared.  Luxury to heartache, huh?

Well, all of this went through my mind last night when I was standing there listening to them perform.  But then I thought, there are Boston boys and they tried to stay true to their hometown, which is pretty admirable.

Anyway, here’s to you Joey Mcintyre.  Hope you forgive me for the all nasty things I said about you and your band when I was 12: