• She has spent as much as $275 for one ticket to see NKOTB.
• On three separate occasions, she stayed awake for 72 hours in order not to miss any New Kids appearance on the United Cerebral Palsy telethon.
• She once wrote a 386-page story about the New Kids.
Of course, other eight-to-16-year-olds did similarly obsessive things (excluding, perhaps, that 386-page story). But where many fans ditched the New Kids like training wheels, moving on to grunge and hip-hop, superfans like Julianna and Nicki have never abandoned their roots. Their fanaticism extended way beyond seventh grade, into high school, college, and even adulthood. Last winter, Julianna and Nicki spent more than six hours waiting in the freezing cold to meet Joey McIntyre at a CD-signing event. When spring came, they both stood outside the premiere and after-party for Donnie's movie Southie. And they both have tickets to Joey's two shows next week.
"My mom says, 'I can't believe you're still a teenybopper,' " says Nicki. "We joke around at work, and my co-workers say I'm going to be the only 40-year-old teenybopper."
As pop-music phenomenons go, the New Kids era was relatively short. The Dorchester-bred band burst onto the scene in late 1988 with its second album, Hangin' Tough, which featured "You Got It (The Right Stuff)" and four other Top 10 hits. That was followed in 1989 by the re-release of the Kids' first recording, the eponymous New Kids on the Block (known among fans as the "Baby record," since it was recorded in 1986, pre-puberty for Joey) and a quickie Christmas record, Merry Merry Christmas. The group peaked in 1990 with its fourth record, Step by Step, and the subsequent Coke-sponsored "Magic Summer" stadium tour, which was followed by 1991's "remix" album, No More Games. By then, however, New Kids backlash had set in, and things started going downhill. The group's rap-flavored 1994 comeback attempt, Face the Music -- for which the New Kids clunkily restyled themselves NKOTB -- was a commercial flop. Most of the group's remaining fans fled to the hills.
"I went through four years of my life thinking I was the only fan left," says Julianna. "It was really hard, because it made me [question] my faith in people. How could they love something so much for three years, and then all of a sudden hate it?"
But a funny thing happened on the way to the cutout bin: the Internet. After years of isolation, girls still clutching their Danny Wood dolls in Des Moines went online and realized they were not alone. To hear Amy Beth Lavelle describe it, she had pretty much put the New Kids in her rear-view mirror until she got a computer in 1997. "I went on a Yahoo search and found all these Web sites and kept up that way," says Amy Beth, who lives in Buffalo, New York. "It's kind of funny how it happened."
Today, there are more than 200 New Kids-related sites on the Internet, including the worshipful Day Dreaming of NKOTB (with Donnie Wahlberg wedding photos!), the cute Confessions of a Recovering New Kids Addict, and the official site, Keep Keepin' On, an exhaustive fan-operated site that the group adopted as its own. There are New Kid pages in French, Spanish, Korean, and Japanese, and each New Kid also has sites dedicated to his own exploits. Most of the sites feature photos, group members' personal histories, and trivia; some include chat rooms, memory pages, fan fiction, and even poetry (sample: "Jordan Knight, you're my one and only/Without you, I feel very lonely").
Laugh if you want, but the New Kids' passionate Web following directly contributed to at least one member's comeback. After struggling to get a recording deal, Joey McIntyre cut his solo album, Stay the Same, on his own, and then hawked it on his Web site. With minimal radio airplay, Stay the Same sold more than 2000 copies online, and record companies took notice. McIntyre signed with Columbia, the New Kids' old label, which then released the album under its own name, launching Joey Fever, Part II, in earnest.
"My roommate was in the shower listening to the radio, and she comes out saying, 'Omigod, Joey McIntyre is on the radio!' " Julianna Mardo recalls. "I ran into the room and turned on Kiss 108, and found out a day later that he was having a concert [in Boston]. I couldn't believe it. It all started again. It was dead for years."
The new New Kids shows are quite different from those heady Magic Summer days, fans report. For one thing, the venues are considerably more intimate. Joey and the gang once played Foxboro Stadium, but his solo comeback tour was launched with two club dates (both sellouts) at the Paradise. And the fans, of course, are older. "When Joey broke into 'The Right Stuff' [at the Paradise], I had a beer in my hand," says Julianna. "It was such a mind tease: I'm not 12, I'm drinking a beer, and Joey McIntyre is on stage."
