CSotD: Mysteries of Boy Band Bonding
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Okay, this is beyond my experience.
Heart of the City is in an arc in which Heart's mom is taking her and her buddy Kat to a One Direction concert, One Direction being, as that link will show you, a for-real androgynous pre-teen pre-fab group.
(And let me pause here to give Mark Tatulli props for referencing them rather than inventing a fictional boy band. Authenticity is not the enemy of good storytelling.)
I wish I could remember where, years ago, I read a first-person account of a mother going to one of these concerts, which was probably NSYNC or Backstreet Boys but which was definitely hilarious because the bulk of her narrative was based on the theme of "Oh God Please Make It Stop" and would fit nicely with the third panel above.
As a country boy who raised two sons, I have no real frame of reference for this.
I had city friends and I was aware that they had a lot more entertainment opportunities than we did. Back home, with the nearest concert venue being a college campus 45 miles away, our parents couldn't just drop us off and come back later, and the bands that did show up were not geared towards 12-year-olds anyway.
Plus, we were guys.
I'm also not sure how many groups were aimed directly at teenyboppers back then anyway. Certainly there were some singers of shall-we-say-limited-scope — Fabian and Frankie Avalon come to mind — but others, like Ricky Nelson and Paul Anka, were genuinely talented, despite also being dreamy. They were, however, aimed more at emerging teens than at the little sisters of emerging teens.
But I think Beatlemania was part of what touched off the mad scramble among record companies to throw mud at the pre-teen wall, with Bobby Sherman, Paul Revere and the Raiders and such. The Beatles weren't intended for 12 year olds, the Monkees kinda were.
My older brother was news director at Georgetown's radio station when the Beatles hit America. He got to go to the press conference, interview George and then attend the concert, that last of which, he reported, was absolutely appalling for exactly the reasons we can anticipate in upcoming Heart of the City strips.
The first rock concert I went to was my senior year, when I doubled to a Rascals concert with a pal, his GF and a classmate who was very cute and wanted to see the Rascals more than she wanted to go out with me but we had a nice time despite — certainly not "because of" — being crammed into the back seat of a '66 Mustang for an hour or so each direction.
But Rascals fans were not screamers. We were there for the music.
And then there's the whole raising girls rather than boys thing. I took my boys to football and hockey games and to movies, but not to teeny-bop rock concerts.
I remember gritting my teeth through "Gremlins," which I think was longer than Sergey Bondarchuk's adaptation of "War and Peace," but I at least had the excuse of not knowing ahead of time how bad it was going to be, and I'm certainly glad I had some young, unspoiled eyes with me for the first "Star Wars."
(We won't discuss the subsequent toy commercials, except to say, "Fool me one, shame on you. Fool me twice, won't get fooled again.")
Anyway, I've heard of mother-and-daughter bonding trips to these sorts of concerts, but it's bad enough being the next room when my granddaughters have the Disney Channel on. I think if I were to take them to a One Direction concert and there were an anthill next to the venue, I'd bring a jar of honey and a set of stakes and wait for them there.
If you have any insights, please share them: Where do "bonding" and "spoiling" and "assisting in their commercial exploitation" cross over on this?
But I like this bonding experience:
Today's Cul-de-Sac classic brings back memories of Maine.
Here's the start of the bike parade at Kingfield Festival Days, which was one of the most delightfully disorganized two-block events I've ever attended.
But this photo from Wilton's Blueberry Festival continues to genuinely tug at my heart strings. This is a for-real parade, but the backstory is that a cable-access show was supposed to be recording the parade, and the hostess was going above and beyond her assigned mission by stepping out into the street and interviewing the participants, which would bring each parade segment to a halt, with the result that there were huge gaps between bands, floats and assorted groups.
Meanwhile, this littlest member of a youth group had, over the previous couple of miles, fallen well behind the rest of her cohort and yet was resolutely pressing on, with Mom at her side, getting applause along the route, which I think they both deserved.
Now that's a mother-daughter bonding experience to treasure!
And now, here's your moment of hen:
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