Life improved after I got into work this morning. Mr. W’s coworker was trying to unload two concert tickets for next Wednesday and she’s having trouble finding a buyer. Mr. W told me of her woes sympathetically, and I asked, just making conversation, whose concert it was.
“Boyz II Men and, um, Brian McKnight or something?”
I almost fell out of my chair. “Really???”
“Yeah,” he seemed surprised. “Why, you wanna go?”
The venue is an outdoors concert hall in a city right next to the city that I work in. It’s perfect for a Wednesday night concert!
“But aren’t they has-beens?” Mr. W asked. “They’re not BOYZ anymore, they’re more like MEN now, aren’t they? ha ha.”
Ha, ha. Boyz II Men andBrian McKnight defined my generation’s high school R&B music. I bought every music single by Boyz II Men as they were released, rather than wait for the entire album to be released. I played Brian McKnight’s “One Last Cry” so often that rather than playing then rewinding then playing then rewinding the cassette tape single every 5 minutes, I recorded it back-to-back on a second cassette tape many times over so that I could pop the 2nd tape in, press “play”, and have that song played back for 45 minutes straight. I have a letter on which my (male) friend quoted a segment of Boyz II Men’s “I’ll Make Love to You” on the top margin. My girlfriends and I cried to “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye (to Yesterday)” at the Class of 93’s graduation. My friend Lily gave the single “End of the Road” to a boy she liked in high school who was about to move away. My friend Vicky had a card written to her by some boy who quoted his own variation of “Down on Bended Knee”. A friend who was asking me to stop being mad at him on the phone one night quoted the speaking part of a Boyz II Men song, “Baby, I’m sorry. Please forgive me for all the wrong I’ve done…” in exactly the same deep baritone voice and inflections as in the song, and made me laugh and get over whatever I was upset about. I blasted Brian McKnight’s “You Should Be Mine” indignantly in my car when I was getting over some guy, and crooned to his “Back at One” when I dreamt of my future perfect boyfriend. I could go on, but this post is already getting long.

I’M GONNA GO SEE BOYZ II MEN AND BRIAN MCKNIGHT IN CONCERT NEXT WEDNESDAY!!! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!! It’s gonna be my first pop music concert EVER! (I’ve only been to Jim Brickman before this, and it was an excellent, funny, and very entertaining concert, but it was piano music with the occasional saxophone.)