I originally wrote this post in the Fall of 2012, but it was time to give it another whirl since I am fresh off of seeing One Direction live with my daughters. Today seemed liked a good day to do it since my ears finally stopped ringing from the hysteria of 19,000 screaming girls. But don’t sign me up for martyrdom just yet. Read on. -Ellen
I’m not exactly over the hill, but let’s just say I can see the crest without squinting. So a “What the fudge?” might be expected when One Direction is discovered on my iPod, Twitter feed, DVR, and Instagram. (Holla for the new secret boards on Pinterest.)
But I have a free pass. One Direction permeates my life, because I have 11 and 14 year old daughters! They are my ticket out of creepy Cougarville. Truly. I can barely write this post, because I’m waiting to push the record button to catch 1D on The Today Show. I can’t record the whole two hours. Are you mad? Our DVR is bursting with classics like Three o’clock High and Caddyshack. I need room for The X-Factor tonight. And I swear I’ll get around to watching those seven episodes of The Ellen Show.
But I have a confession to make. I may have a wee bit of a crush on them. Stop dialing Child Protective Services. They’re all legal. Granted I could have given birth to any one of them without starring on Teen Mom, BUT my beer pong career would have been cut tragically short. As the saying goes, “Familiarity breeds infatuation.” Or at least that’s the truth with boy bands. Stop rolling your eyes.
Come on! Look at these guys! They are adorable.
Don’t know who they are? Well for the love of teen angst, tear your eyes away from The National Enquirer in the checkout line and glance at the journalistic staple that is Us Magazine. They are a group of British and Irish lads thrown together by Simon Cowell after they auditioned on the British edition of The X Factor. Their first album Up All Night went straight to number one on the Billboard 200, selling 176,000 copies in its first week, making One Direction the first British group in history to achieve this feat with their debut album. The Beatles didn’t even do that (although back in the day, you had to do more than know your mum’s credit card number and click a button to buy music). They are being called the reinvention of the “British Invasion.” Impressed?
And you know you can relate. How many of you had your own boy band crushes growing up? Or had to pretend to listen to your girlfriends gush on and on about them?
Now raise your hand and hang your head if you were thinking YOUR boy band was WAY better than One Direction. Time mellows the horror of acid-washed denim. I understand, but you got to admit that Cowell weeded out ALL of the goon factor when he put 1D together. Not talking about you, Justin Timberlake, never you. You’re the anti-goon.
So ‘N Sync was a little after my time, but I can remember my own infatuation with Duran Duran. Now, they were NOT a boy band. They played their own instruments for mullet’s sake, although Simon Le Bon might have fancied a bit of Auto-Tune vocal sweetening after a hard night of partying.
But I LUVVVVVVED them. I collected their magazines, t-shirts, buttons, albums, 12-inch singles, and biographies. All without the help of the internet. I had to mail order some of these treasures from the ads in the back of Tiger Beat for the love of archaic practices. Can’t you envision me explaining that to the grandkids?
I also had to sit tensely poised to hit the record button on the VCR for Friday Night Videos to catch me some Hungry Like The Wolf. Wait a minute. I’m still doing that to this day because I’m too lazy to dump the DVR onto the external hard drive. Just goes to show you that the more things change the more they stay the same. But back then, there was no replay redemption with YouTube and Hulu. And you had to walk barefoot uphill to the VCR through a blizzard. Being a fan was a full-time job that paradoxically sucked away all of my babysitting money.
And apparently the kind of infatuated fandom that blossoms during adolescence worms its way into your very soul. When my daughters started showing signs of Fan Fever, I found myself drawn to the flame. I sat with them glued to YouTube reviewing the history of 1D’s formation on The X-Factor. I watched the fan diaries and the movie parodies. I watched their Saturday Night Live performance frame by frame so we could analyze their expressions. And oh yeah, I listen to their music LOUDLY every single day. It gives variety to the One Direction soundtrack stuck in my head.
I have done all of this without even a smidgen of patronizing indulgence. One of my greatest blessings from having children is getting to produce and partake in the childhood of my dreams. But to get to relive one of the bright spots? Just wonderful. I love sharing it with them without one shred of cynicism. I’m actually jealous of all of their access, but it was more than a little bit fun to dump out my old school memorabilia box with them.
The baton is a bonus
Thanks, Mom, for saving it for me. My band infatuation was my training wheels for love – safe practice for when the real experience came along. And thanks to My True Love, Frank, for fulfilling my final Duran Duran dream — Going to a concert!
Well, it was almost my final dream. Now if only that great bassist, John Taylor, would follow me back on Twitter. It’s @SensibleMoms. Just sayin’.
