Tales of a 15-year-old Backstreet Boys fan - March 2000 - part 1

Remember when I first blogged about the amazing the NKOTBSB show in June HERE ? With the countdown to NKOTBSB Round 2 quickly winding down - 6 days to go! - I've been re-immersing myself in all things Backstreet and learning all things New Kid. The excitement for the upcoming concert has me reminiscing of the greatest concert I ever went to and the events that lead up to it. I alluded to it in my previous post, but did not go into detail. 


In December of 1999 it was announced that the last stop on the world famous "Into the Millennium" Tour would be in my home-town in March of 2000. We'd only been to one other BSB concert prior to this so naturally our 14 and 15-year-old selves were dying to go. The way tickets were sold back then was that you had to get a green wristband, which were given out about a week before the official "on sale" date. Hundreds of wristbands with 5 digit numbers were given out for each location, and on the morning of December 11th 1999 one number was chosen at random. That number would then get first pick at the tickets and each following number and so on. That meant that anyone whose wristband number was right before it had to go to the back of the line.

The way it happened to work out for us was that there was myself and 2 girlfriends - then other girls - then my mom who had so graciously agreed to wear a wristband 'just in case'. We were put into the lineup by our respective numbers, and once the 500 or so people were settled, THE NUMBER was drawn. Naturally no one could hear the actual number, but it quickly trickled back through the line like a wave. Once the wave stopped, chaos and screaming broke out. 


It's been over a decade and I can still vividly remember hearing the number and knowing it was a higher number then our wristbands and thinking we'd never get tickets.My mom says I gave her the saddest look ever (I have no recollection of this) but she very calmly came over to me and said "It's my number".  


I swear at that moment the world stopped. For several minutes. 


I'd heard what she'd said, but it just would not compute in my head. By the time reality set back in she was already marching up to the ticket window. In the 2 minutes or so she was busy paying, my girlfriends and I had been reduced to shaking, anxious messes. We knew our prospects were good, but we had no idea how good - we were betting on maybe 5th row floor. She came out with FRONT ROW tickets. 

The actual tickets - I know, a little hard to see

I wrote a concert review 3 days after the concert and posted it on a popular website at the time. Something spurred me on a few weeks ago to see if I could still find it. It may have been lost in a virtual "dusty file cabinet" - but I found it and in my next post I will share it with all of you!