The end.
It just occurred to me that at this exact second I am, for the first time ever, missing the first show of a Hanson "tour" on North American soil. Mostly, I don't care. I've been to the Starland Ballroom; I've eaten at the ghetto little pizza place down the road and laughed at the teenies lined up outside the venue, looking hot enough for fainting at one show, cold enough for frostbite at another.
I'm through with it in the same way I always knew I would be, someday. I've been through it before, after all--the planning, the dreaming, the adoring from afar. In 1990 I thought I'd never make it through a day without listening to Hangin' Tough, but by 1994 it was just another forgotten cassette cluttering up my nightstand. Getting over a band is a little like a chick breaking out of its egg, I guess: for the longest time it seems impossible. But then, one day, it happens seamlessly, and without a second thought. Just as nature intended.
I won't deny that this makes me a little sad. There isn't a single moment in my life I remember as vividly as watching Hanson take the stage at a tiny promo concert in Groton, Connecticut almost seven years ago. That day I thought I would dissolve of happiness, that I would shatter into a thousand joyously trilling pieces, and that I would most certainly never, ever be the same again.
And maybe I'm not. Because of Hanson I've seen more of America than practically everyone I know, even if what I saw mostly revolved around one endless freeway after another, and a sea of faceless suburban tract malls that could have been in New Jersey just as easily as they could have been in Oklahoma. I've met people from around the world, and done things nobody would have imagined I would do, from write what pretty much amounts to a novel to travel across the country to love something so completely, so indelibly, that I've been changed by it forever.
I'm through with it in the same way I always knew I would be, someday. I've been through it before, after all--the planning, the dreaming, the adoring from afar. In 1990 I thought I'd never make it through a day without listening to Hangin' Tough, but by 1994 it was just another forgotten cassette cluttering up my nightstand. Getting over a band is a little like a chick breaking out of its egg, I guess: for the longest time it seems impossible. But then, one day, it happens seamlessly, and without a second thought. Just as nature intended.
I won't deny that this makes me a little sad. There isn't a single moment in my life I remember as vividly as watching Hanson take the stage at a tiny promo concert in Groton, Connecticut almost seven years ago. That day I thought I would dissolve of happiness, that I would shatter into a thousand joyously trilling pieces, and that I would most certainly never, ever be the same again.
And maybe I'm not. Because of Hanson I've seen more of America than practically everyone I know, even if what I saw mostly revolved around one endless freeway after another, and a sea of faceless suburban tract malls that could have been in New Jersey just as easily as they could have been in Oklahoma. I've met people from around the world, and done things nobody would have imagined I would do, from write what pretty much amounts to a novel to travel across the country to love something so completely, so indelibly, that I've been changed by it forever.