Commentary

My husband came into the kitchen, slid up behind me at the kitchen counter, and wrapped his arms around my waist. “I just wanted to tell you that I came up against a limit on how much I love you,” he said. It was an odd thing for a husband of eleven months to say. It was an odd thing for a man in a roomful of knives and blunt instruments to say. “What do you mean?” I asked brightly, fascinated to hear how he was going to talk himself out of this one.

“I heard on the radio that the New Kids on the Block are playing downtown,” he said. “And I knew that you always wanted to go see them when you were little, but never got the chance. So I went online to get tickets and surprise you, but they start at forty dollars. I’m sorry, but I don’t love you quite enough to spend eighty dollars to watch the New Kids on the Block from the nosebleed section.”

Sonofagun, he pulled it off.

I hugged him back and thanked him for having the $80 thought. But as I returned to scrubbing the casserole dish, I wondered what my limit was to watch a pushing-forty Donnie Wahlberg bump and grind it to “Cover Girl.” Ten bucks? Fifteen? Or was it best to simply have the bar tale of “I Never Saw The New Kids in Concert, Poor Thing”? Would it merely depress me to see lines around the eyes of Jordan Knight, and might it forever damage my preteen memories to listen to Joey hit notes that have been well out of reach since the Bush Sr. administration?

As a music amphitheater employee right out of college, I once worked an N’Sync concert, and with a great deal of discomfort beheld the shrieking, the signage, the camping out, the obsession, the suspension of appreciation for good music, for in-tune music. I knew I was watching my very self, minus ten years. I came to terms with many years of New Kids-ism in a single night.

So I’d still go see my five former crushes if I had the means—but with a set of earplugs, maybe, and the hard rind of adulthood around my heart, absolutely.

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