Girls’ Night Out

Last weekend, nearly all of the 30-year-old women of Columbus descended pack-like on the Arena District. Their mission? A night of extreme female-bonding over the reunion concert of ’80s boy-band sensations New Kids on the Block.

It was Girls’ Night Out on a monstrous scale. The few unfortunate fiancés and husbands dragged along as dates may never be the same.

If you are 30-something and you have ladyparts, you were there. Or at the very least you wished you were there. Nearly a week has passed; the sitter has been paid, the Facebook photos have been uploaded, and the Greatest Hits collections have been downloaded on iTunes. But the magic has not faded for the throngs in attendance at the New Kids on the Block reunion tour at Nationwide Arena April 3.

While other generations before had, say, the musical stylings of the Beatles, women who grew up with NKOTB fully embraced the hand dealt to them. And damned if we didn’t show up 20 years after the fact, no matter if we were 6, 7 or 8 months pregnant, on crutches, in a wheelchair—or even if we had, err … put on a few pounds since the late ’80s. Now that we were able to drive ourselves to Columbus, nothing was coming between us and Jordan, Jon, Danny, Donnie and Joey.

In fact, we’d like to think that the Jonas Brothers’ fandemonium has nothin’ on the minions of motherhood who flooded Nationwide Arena last weekend. Plus, we can totally drink now.

 (Sure, there are some who don't share the love. New Kids makes them scream, too -- but for entirely different reasons. Those folks may find solace reading the "What's the Fuss?" take  here .) 

Upon entering the Frog Bear & Wild Boar for the pre-show Arena District imbibing, the elevated tone of estrogen-charged chatter was immediate and deafening—and it never subsided. Girls were everywhere, fueled with the realization that they were moments away from gazing upon their dreamiest childhood crushes. And they were sucking down mixed drinks faster than their toddlers were downing Capri Suns back at home with Dad.

The hysteria was contagious, for sure. “Step by Step,” came on the radio, and a wave of screams erupted. We let little shrieks slip out ourselves when we realized: we had screamed for a boy band. And we meant it. It was going to be a wonderful evening.

Eyes were drawn naturally toward the 3 or 4 males in the bar, whom one would assume would be in male-to-female ratio heaven. Such was not the case for Jason Hanger, a Nationwide employee who wandered across High Street into NKOTB territory..

“I’m afraid,” Hanger said, cowering in the corner of the bar. “There are leggings … they are singing along to songs that have been out for decades.”

“I get the sense they could stampede at any second,” he said.

Another table of four men clearly relished playing the odds from their seats next to the bar. “I’m a little surprised that NSYNC is so popular,” joked Mike Fielding, much to the joy of his buddies. Then he appraised the crowd a little more seriously. “It was kind of by accident that we came, but we’ll be here all night.”

Still others were taking a more practical approach.

“The drunker the better,” said some poor dude in a sport coat, who had made the mistake of dating a devoted New Kids fan for about five years before the reunion tour. Unfortunately, the statement came shortly before he accidentally knocked his beer off the table.

Added the sucker boyfriend, “Ah, well. I have earplugs.”

 

Sport Coat’s earplugs probably made no difference. The noise inside Nationwide Arena hurt—and it seemed to intensify every few minutes for no reason whatsoever. (The cheering was louder than the Horseshoe on game day, people.) All the men’s restrooms had been converted to women’s rooms. Every detail indicated that it was our night.

We wondered whether the boys would be flown in on wires, dropped in on parachutes or might simply arrive from heaven for their grand entrance. We were half right. In an entrance fit for the late-’80s, the Fab Five were lifted from the center of the stage by some sort of hydraulic platform, with stacks of smoke shooting into the air on either side.

We peed a little. And through lyrics like, “You got the right stuff, baby,” women wrapped their arms around each other and swayed, arms raised, an occasional jump or two thrown in for fun.

From there, things just got louder.

No matter your sense of irony or sense of kitsch going into the New Kids concert, it was not only the tempting—it was required—to revert back into an uncontrollable giddy, shrieking pre-teen state of mind. The same impulse that decades earlier had prompted the purchase of 6-inch buttons, New Kids bedsheets and lunch boxes, as well as dolls, slippers, and of course, many a cassette tape, was resurrected by the sight of five dudes lined up on a stage singing the cheesiest ballads imaginable.

“Just us getting back together, you guys are having a reunion of your own,” marveled Joey McIntyre. This statement was the one indication that the band understood the female-bonding phenomenon that had grown up around them.

The 2009 New Kids weren’t quite as sharp as they may be on old YouTube videos, but it wasn’t exactly Old Kids Who’ve Been Around the Block, either. Danny Wood, especially, offered a few break-dancing moves for the audience, even spinning on his head at one point, to the delight of the crowd. Jordan could still falsetto with the best of them. On the other hand, Jonathan looked like you could cut him a check anytime, and he’d be happy to stay at home.

Still, how many 40-year-old men enjoy the privilege of waving their arms in such a way that grown women cannot physically keep themselves from crying out? Nor do most men possess the psychic power to compel strong, independent women to wear their hair in side-ponytails. The New Kids—ranging in age from 36 to 40—did just that here in Columbus, and likely at every stop on their reunion tour.

A couple of times during the show, the boys requested that the house lights be turned up so that they could take a look at the crowd. In one glorious gimmick, Jonathan filmed the crowd from the stage, projecting on to the giant backdrop the magnified image of one attractive younger fan shaking her shoulders next to the bouncing belly of a very pregnant woman dancing beside her. You got the sense that the band members were a bit taken aback by the enthusiasm.

What became a bit confusing—maybe even sad—was how clearly the band actually misunderstood the reaction. We may have been screaming, but we weren’t so crazed as to lose site of the evening’s one unmistakable pop-culture reality—that this was more of a throw-back than a comeback. (There weren’t many ladies screaming, “Play the new stuff!” for example.) But that reality seemed lost on the New Kids, who indeed had new stuff to play, from an actual 2009 New Kids release. As if. We couldn’t shake the horrifying feeling that the New Kids were trying to be current—or worse—relevant in 2009.

No amount of synchronized dancing or harmonizing could mask the fact that this show was all about the women who had bonded over this schmaltz 20 years earlier as adolescents. The NKOTB reunion was a success simply because it served to reunite a generation of mostly white, suburban women with their girlhood BFFs who, as adults, likely share little more than a common nostalgia for the pop idols of their girlhoods. But on that night, in that place, everything else was incidental.

The band should be giving praise daily that their success is based on the phenomenon of nostalgia and not on critical reviews.

The absolute worst part of the show came during a weird slideshow featuring dead rappers and other deceased musical talents—everyone from Tupac and Aaliyah to Frank Sinatra and Luther Vandross—while the song “We’ll miss you,” played in the background.

A tribute to their inspirations? Luther would roll if he knew he was credited with inspiring lyrics like, “We’re gonna put you in a trance with a funky song, cause you gotta be hangin’ tough.” Sorry, New Kids. You may be able to pack an arena, but you are not that kind of icon. .

 

Among the more bizarre facets of the reunion tour were Donnie Wahlberg’s self-proclaimed “Face Time” post-concert promotional stops. Online vids of Wahlberg on his self-proclaimed reunion-tour mission to collect a “million hugs” at after-parties show the singer hanging out with older female fans at a Waffle House in Florida, and other “bars and hotel lobbies.” Following the Columbus show, Wahlberg booked an appearance at Sugar Bar in the Arena District.

For a $10 door charge, Wahlberg’s biggest local fans bought the chance to breathe the same Sugar Bar air, feel the same Sugar Bar bass and drink the same outlandishly priced Sugar Bar cocktails as their fifth-grade heartthrob.

Sugar’s tight dance floor and lounge spaces were crammed even tighter than usual with “more women than I’ve ever seen in here,” according to one male bartender manning the packed first-level bar.

A great many pushing-30 girls’-nighters followed Wahlberg from the concert to the promo after-party on Park Street, incited by the recently divorced New Kid’s onstage banter.

“I ain’t never had a girlfriend from Ohio—and I ain’t leaving ‘til I got her,” Wahlberg said during the show, just after telling the ladies how much louder they’d been than the girls in Cleveland.

The contrast between the mood of the concert and the tone of the after-party left more than a few women in the post-show crowd disoriented. Wahlberg appeared briefly from the club’s second-tier balcony to wave to his crowd of older, distinctly un-clubby women, nestled between the popping bosoms of a threesome of bikini-clad girls. He then quickly retreated into his nook in the VIP area where he canoodled with the Sugar Bar elite. Meanwhile, the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd of fans below pushed against the row of bouncers trying to catch another glimpse of NKOTB’s bad boy.

Sugar’s DJ played “Hangin Tough” during Wahlberg’s initial 45-second shout-out to the crowd, but quickly followed it with Ludacris’s “Move Bitch.” The message was not subtle, as the club’s bouncers began shoving the crowd of women, Red-Rover style, back from Wahlberg’s cordoned-off zone.

Women who 30 minutes before had been crooning along with Wahlberg’s rendition of “Cover Girl” (“Don’t you know I could never leave your side girl/Won’t you stay here with me and be my bride/ Girl you’re everything, don’t you know you’re alright”) were now wrestling for standing-room to the strains of Ludacris’s canned directive to “Move Bitch/get out the way…Ima tell you like this bitch/ You better not walk in front of my tour bus.”

It was palpable how quickly teenaged boy-band fantasies were displaced by big-boy reality.

This decidedly un-boy-band fan treatment should have come as no surprise to Wahlberg’s devoted followers, given that the recently released The Block was penned almost entirely by him, and features collaborations with rappers Akon and Timbaland on songs with titles like “Grown Man,” “Put it On My Tab” and “Sexify my Love.”

Still, dejected women in “Property of Donnie” t-shirts skulked out of the club. Already 20 years older, hopefully the next time their teen idols’ reunion tour comes to town, they’ll have grown a little wiser, too.