Up My Own Ass

Why won’t *Nsync get back together?  I love *Nsync.

Notice that I didn’t say, “I LOVED *Nsync.”

I realize that is a bold admission from someone wishing to be taken seriously…well…at ALL, but hear me out.  When *Nsync was on top of their game, cranking out their wonderfully gooey brand of soft-core pop ejaculate, I was missing my youth terribly - mostly because of a miserable job and a gag-inducing spouse, and also exacerbated by the fact that I had itty-bitty babies at the time.  I did not envy me.

Then I heard “I Want You Back.”

On a whim, I bought tickets (in March) for a concert (in August), and - to my shock and dismay - I couldn’t find one other soul that was willing to accompany me.  I finally convinced my best friend to actually FLY here to go with me.  We dressed like Pentecostal soccer moms and stood out like a couple of sore dicks, but it was fun and they were hot.  The following spring, something in our collective psyche snapped like a waistband, and we decided we should go see them again - this time for TWO NIGHTS IN A ROW.  We felt like renegades driving out of town and staying at a fancy hotel (this time with my sister in tow, and all of us tarted up like uncommon floozies), and we reveled in our brokered nosebleed seats.  I even almost got into a fistfight with a preteen over some thrown popcorn.

From that moment on, nothing would be as dull and boring as it once was, and every facet of my life would shimmer with sparkly iridescence.

When it was all said and done, we had gone to 14 concerts together, in four different cities.  It was, and still is okay because Chris is my age, and that means I am young enough to love a boy band.  During our lives as groupies, we managed to do some things that our workaday lives never would have permitted - we gambled with Joey in Vegas, met Chris at Nordstrom in San Diego, and had a stranger literally walk right up to us and hand us free passes to the MTV special that was taping AT THAT VERY MOMENT (talk about falling into deep clover…three hours of up close and personal *Nsync facetime, and I still have the sunburn scar to prove it - it’s called Road to Celebrity…see if you can find me).  Chris passed over a tall blonde standing next to me in the front row at that night’s concert, to shake MY hand.  We even finagled passes to a sound check from a security guard, and we never once had to show our boobies or lift our skirts.  Wit and glitter is all we needed.

We saw our last *Nsync concert in spring of 2002, and things have changed quite a lot since then (the kids are now mostly teenagers, and the gag-inducer is now an EX, replaced by a much nicer model), but we still pine for those days and wish we could once again plan for an *Nsync trip.  It was such a great time.  If the Backstreet Boys can resurrect themselves, why can’t *Nsync?

I can’t take these long goodbyebyebyes.