I’m feeling grateful for a couple of reasons today. First, it’s a blessing to finally have the Boys together and back on tour! So far, the U.S./Canadian leg of the DNA tour seems to have gone off without a hitch, and I hope it continues to go well! The Boys are currently in my part of the country for their first batch of Midwest shows this summer. I wasn’t planning to see them until the end of the month, when they come to Chicago and St. Louis, but I made the somewhat spontaneous decision to drive up to Milwaukee with a friend last night for their show, and I’m so glad I did! We both scored front row seats (behind the pit) for under $300 a couple days before the show, which is crazy to me! I am not a “wait until the last minute” concert ticket buyer, especially not for BSB. The trauma of having the entire Millennium tour sell out in a matter of seconds the first time I tried to get tickets to one of their shows as a young teenager has stuck with me, and I always try to get my tickets the instant they go on sale (usually in a pre-sale) because I’m worried they’ll sell out if I wait. So being this spontaneous was a new experience for me, but it couldn’t have worked out better!
Not only were we in the front row (behind the pit), but Kevin’s kids stood right in front of us the whole night. They were both really cute, trying to get his attention and totally rocking out to BSB. Max is clearly Kevin’s number one fan and danced and clapped all night as if he hasn’t seen this show at least twenty times this year alone. Mason has gotten really tall, like his dad! I recognized Max right away, but it took me longer to verify that the lanky kid standing next to him was actually Mason. Maybe it’s because I’ve been writing about him as a baby for the last year and half, LOL. Since my writing has been so Kevin-centered lately, I definitely had a moment during the show where I looked at Mason in front of me and then up at Kevin dancing on the stage and then over at Kristin, who was off in the far back corner of the pit, and thought about My Brother’s Keeper. I have these moments from time to time – the last time I did VIP was in Vegas in 2017, like ten days after finishing Sick as My Secrets, and all I wanted to do was give Howie the biggest hug, LOL. But aside from feeling grateful that real life does not resemble my fanfiction, I also realized that the way I see the characters in my stories is different from the way I see the guys (and their families) in real life. It’s hard to explain, but even though I model my characters after real people and try to make them realistic, they sort of take on a life of their own that I can separate from the real people they’re based on. I guess that’s why the guilt I sometimes feel when I write these horrifically tragic stories about real people I love has never stopped me from writing them: because, at the end of the day, they’re still just fiction.
The second reason I’m feeling grateful today is that it’s July 9, the anniversary of when AJ went to rehab for the first time. I still vividly remember watching TRL on July 9, 2001 when Nick, Kevin, Brian, and Howie made an appearance to announce that they were postponing the Black & Blue tour because AJ was going into treatment. Besides being disappointed that the concert I had tickets to in a few weeks was getting bumped back a few months, I was worried about AJ and sad for the other guys. Obviously, sobriety has been a difficult journey for AJ since then. I wrote him sober in My Brother’s Keeper because he claimed to be sober in real life at that time, but in light of his more recent revelations, who knows? All I know is that he looked and sounded really good and healthy onstage last night! This is the best he has looked in the last two decades. So I’m proud of AJ and grateful that he seems to have gotten it together.
Sorry for the long blog, but Chapter 47 of My Brother’s Keeper is up! This is technically a filler chapter meant to move time forward a few months, but I love the way it turned out. I hope you enjoy it, too!
