inciting incidents
I have spent years of my life imagining how I would meet Hanson. When I was younger, I would fantasize about running into them at an airport or by hotel pools. Maybe their car would break down in front of my house; maybe I would win a radio station contest and get invited backstage and they would think I was so cute and then they would be like “listen I’m in town for a few days, do you want to hang out” and I’d be like “yeah I guess” and then we would—
However it happened, it was always the moment my life would hinge on. Because that’s how stories started— all of the stories I was reading then, anyway. When a girl met the boys in the band.
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Over the weekend I was at a friend’s barbecue, sweating. It was the kind of sweat that beads and rolls, makes riverbeds on your skin. I was uncomfortably aware of my body underneath the loose jumpsuit I was wearing.
I was drinking a seltzer; I was talking to some friends. There were kids everywhere, and parents chasing them. I looked at one of the parents and thought: oh.
It was not a member of Hanson, but almost. The kind of person you can only spot if you are deep in weirdo territory and have been for years. There he was: the start of a story. The beginning of everything. He saw me looking and smiled. He kept playing with his son.
Nothing happened after that. We didn’t talk. What was there to say? To admit that I recognized him would have been to murder any chance of a normal conversation. And anyway, the things I want from him, from them, were only ever meant to be fantasy. They aren’t the kinds of things real people can really give you.
I still can’t shake the feeling that it meant something. That something’s supposed to happen now. That my life will be different; that it’s all just about to start.
—
What I do with fantasies that I can neither achieve or shake is, of course, to write about them. My first boy band book was GRACE AND THE FEVER; now I have BIG FAN due out in September. GRACE was my attempt to work through all of the impossible things we want out of celebrity encounters; BIG FAN is a romance about what might happen if you could somehow slip from idolization to real intimacy. And I mean, it does happen. In fact, it did happen the way I imagined, just not for me. All three members of Hanson met their wives backstage at concerts.
Can’t wrap this up without saying that I no longer keep up with the band; it was a long time coming, but after what happened in 2020 it felt like time to officially let go. Before I started writing this I did a little skim through the post-Hanson Reddit and it seems like Isaac has fallen down a right-wing internet rabbit hole re: trans people; good riddance and fuck off forever to him and everyone he’s parroting.
In other news about conservative Americans, I wrote an episode of Scamfluencers about former Vice President and shameless cash-grabber Spiro Agnew.