Clever Magazine,Spring '05 "Out-growing the summer girl " (www.clevermag.com)

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Outgrowing the Summer-girl

By Jamie Kiffel

The summer had just burst into full-on bloom, and as far as I was concerned, she'd tiptoed out of her long pants and into platform Candies, leaving a bottle of Nair waving from the trees. Sweat! Short skirts! Hot awful boardwalk food! The air was alive, and every interested cockroach was inducing screams just for the sheer pleasure of it.

Never mind that I was supposed to be a laptop-toting grown-up of mutual fund-owning age (28, if you must know. I half-choke on its nearness to 30). It doesn’t matter once the air shrieks wild hot summer procreation. I regress into my default mode: 13-year-old boy band worshipper.

I was in precisely this frame of mind when I downloaded JC Chasez's "All Day Long I Dream About Sex," and thus should be excused.

But, being in the aforementioned condition, I couldn't stop with the download of the N*SYNC member's new single (note that I actually know where to put the * in N*SYNC...a bad sign already).

I actually paused from my purportedly very important job at a major national magazine to query Google for JC's concert schedule. This was all the fault of the scream-inducing cockroaches and Nair-using season, of course. But regardless, I actually felt an electric shockwave jolt me when I read that JC was scheduled to perform mere towns away from my home in just two days.

I think I might have even said, "Eep."

JC had songs with lines like "She was leaning on me, getting horny, maybe we get naughty." I knew: I'd now downloaded them all.

This was my chance to see the whole act, unbridled and who knew un- what else, and I could not wait. I bought tickets.

What of it? I really just wanted to see it because it made me laugh.

Stop. Shake head. Rewind. “Horny,” “leaning,” “naughty”--it all cracked me up. Yes, this is where everyone should start to get concerned. I was a staunch fan of Mr. "love you all night strong" (one fine lyric), and all because every time a line like that one wiggled out of my IPod, I'd start laughing. It started with a quiver, then a giggle, then an all-out pee-in-my-pants squeal of ridiculous joy-oh-joy-oh-idiotic-joy.

No, really, this bothered me. So much for the inner 13-year-old. My hormones could be experiencing early senility. They start one place, forget where they were headed and end up all going back for drinks instead.

My boyfriend, a professional composer and pop producer, agreed to come to the concert, too. At 32, he's even older than I am. But he was there to see what kind of electronic-balance-sync-audio they had, or something. He’s confided to me that even straight boys/men have a certain something for boy bands. Not exactly a sexual something, but maybe a sexually-rooted something. Regardless, it was definitely not a Howdy Doody Time-rooted something, and thus did not make me feel any better.

To add to the surrealism, I invited our friend Michael who is, himself, a former boy band member. At over 30, he spends much of his time cultivating a complex persona of disinterest. He only agreed to come because his girlfriend was away.

It was roughly 5pm when we arrived at the outdoor Duchess Stadium in Fishkill, New York. Me: petite with blonde pigtails, jeans and visible eagerness, striding toward the turnstile. Boyfriend: about 5' 8" with fitted t-shirt, black plastic-rimmed glasses and evident complacency, a few paces behind me. Michael: tall in cowboy boots, European jacket and artfully bored expression. He ducked under a hot dog stand to find cell signal.

I did not care. It was time to see the man: JC. A tremor ran through me. Hot, I thought. Hot...in a funny way. There went a giggle again. Was I in denial?

When Michael finally clicked off the cell, he nonchalantly followed my leap through the gate and into a wall of fried dough vapors, whirling pretzel papers and henna tattoos. We were standing in the outer ring of the stadium, where soft pretzels and Slurpees on steroids and personalized T-shirts and mood rings were selling with abandon.

Michael stood still with shards of dark hair styled into a cock's comb atop his head.

"Fried dough, anyone?" he asked finally, in a tone that said, 'I'm famous but no one cares, whatever, I'm wallpaper.'

"I'll have fried dough," Boyfriend agreed.

Meanwhile, I found my way across a small sea of mustardy waxed paper and pizza crusts to a balcony far above the outdoor stage. To my left were three gyrating, ponytailed 15-year-olds with thick lipstick, gold necklaces, and rolls of flesh undulating precariously above snug jeans. It was barely 60 degrees. I threw on an oversized button-down shirt, muffling any pheromones that might have tried to speak up. The girls beside me imitated porn against their boys and each other.

My boys caught up and stood near me like two shifty points of a triangle. Thirty seconds passed.

"I'm gonna get a pretzel," Michael said, and broke the geometry. Not one teen has shrieked in my path, which annoys me, his tone implied. With that, he went back adrift on the roiling hormones, Boyfriend tagging along.

They were gone.

I maneuvered down a flight of stairs to stage level. The girls with the wide hips huddled close to the speakers. I saw: Herd of wobbly porpoises oozing toward a dinghy. I tried to tiptoe across one, and slid over another one's foot. I tried again and almost spilled someone's beer. No one noticed, but I also ran the real risk of getting absorbed into them and never coming out again.

"Here," came a voice, plucking me out of the crowd and pulling me backward to a vantage point where I could see everything--from far away.

"Better, right?" asked the human crane, my boyfriend, who'd reappeared with pretzels and water. An angsty sigh escaped me. Yeah, this was the spot where I'd be able to see. The adult spot. Here, where the strollers and the Stevie Nicks lookalikes smell of Pablum and patchouli. In the outfield. In the "Past Your Prime" spot. In the midst of the wild rumpus, I was a sociologist.

Was I too far away for the teenage hormone action to reach me? Was that true in life, as well? Did my boyfriend know it? Did everyone know it? Was I becoming a prom chaperone with no more sex drive at all?

The music started and I forgot about wrinkle creams for a moment. JC popped up onstage unexpectedly, bursting from behind a leggy blonde dancer who, with a big happy grin, pulled off a naughty nurse's outfit to reveal hot pants and a pushup bra. Daniel laughed a little. Michael shrugged, then gazed off at a plane somewhere.

It was really, honestly, exhilaratingly frantic-mad sexy, and dammit, at the same time, here came the giggles again. It was like the laugh reaction and the sex reaction were locked in a tight tango and would not let go. Funny! Sexy! Hot! Hilarious! Was I bipolar? The mind reeled.

OK, time to very frankly read between the fine lines. I’m coming up on the big 3-0. I know it’s not old, I know, especially with today’s health care and exfoliants and green tea, et cetera. But mentally, maybe when I traded my ubiquitous rucksack with the pink and yellow “love” patch on it for a (big gasp) briefcase—even if that briefcase holds an IPod—I started to understand that something had changed. It got weirder when I stopped into my favorite cheap mall clothing store and—to the tune of some boy band blasting—tried on ultra-hip $15 jeans. Though they fit, I was suddenly rocked by the booming internal voice, “You can’t go out in that!”

I thought about it a lot. At 13, I couldn’t pass a mirrored surface without stopping to check the size of my nose. Now, I can’t pass a mirror without stopping to rationalize a fine line as a mascara trail.

On top of all this, I am a New Yorker. On top of that, I’m an only child and a Jew and a type-A and a perfectionist. And finally, I’m coming up on the age my parents were when I first met them. (HELP, someone give me a paper bag to breathe into.)

Well, I’m not completely sure about this theory, but since this is turning into a mini-psychoanalysis already, and Lord knows I’ve already given away enough for plenty of years of blackmail, let’s just topple this neurotic pyramid once and for all: Maybe, for the sake of my pride and this argument, I'm not sexually dead. Maybe I’m just giddy. Maybe I like boy bands.

Oh God! A peal of laughter escapes me in high A, like a hyena discovered nude.

But when the hyena finally catches her breath, shakes an embarrassed leg and drops about 16 stress points, she thinks, How very…pre-pubescent of me.

So JC was pumping, bumping and singing, against backup falsetto, about "100 positions." And I was laughing. Even at almost-30. (Kind of like JC, who is also almost-30. This is sounding, simultaneously, weirder and more normal by the second.)

Before the last song, I saw Michael slip out of the crowd and head, at the fastest pace still classifiable as "nonchalant," back to the car. Understandably, he was working very hard not to look like he was at a JC concert. He's a grown-up, after all.

***

I decide today, from my puddle of melting ice cave, that I frankly wasn’t grown-up then. Not yet. But during the staid, dark, cold winter, I became the woman beneath the many appropriate layers. I was calm, corporate, and frozen correctly.

That is, until the sun creeps back, the piercings start up and the taffy sellers make cash again. I already am spying the usual flowers starting to break through.

Well, those include me, don’t they?

I think I hear that bumblebee getting closer. Or…is that my radio calling?