Today's post is a look back at the first of two Mixtape Tour shows I went to last year. The Mixtape Tour featured NKOTB, Debbie Gibson, Salt N Pepa, Tiffany, and Naughty By Nature. For the Tacoma show, Sean and I had front row seats on the side and mostly just danced and had a great time. Still, it's New Kids, which means I took a ton of photos. They aren't my best concert photos, but I still wanted to document the experience!
I'll bring you the second show I went to on this tour in the coming week or so. I had even better seats and cannot wait to share the photos with you!!
As I make it through my list of posts to get to, I've been focusing on more clothing items since they sell out quickly. Honestly, I have a TON of events and travel and other fun stuff to talk to you about from the last three years and am still so behind. I'm making my way through slowly but surely because I want to get to the UK trip. It's easy to get way behind and feel overwhelmingly useless, but I'm gonna keep trucking. We can reminisce and look back on this stuff together.
As I mentioned, the Tacoma show was the first of two Mixtape Tour shows I went to last year. Sean attended the Tacoma show with me, where we had front row. That is always exciting! Our seats were on the side, so we saw a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff, which I find fascinating. The cameras got in our way a bit and security kept yelling at people to stay within a small taped-off line in front of our chairs. (This was because some of the acts would walk around the arena from one stage to the other stage.) However, unless you are a size zero, that doesn't leave a lot of room. I don't sit during concerts anyway, so we flipped our chair seat up and stood in our tiny square of space to dance.
The people around us weren't too obnoxious, so we were able to enjoy the concert and have a blast. We were even on the Kiss Cam during "Valentine Girl"!! If you told twelve-year-old Hailey that one day she would be kissing her husband of eleven years on a Kiss Cam during a New Kids concert, she would not have even slightly believed you. She probably would have cried and assumed you were trying to make fun of her because the idea that 1) she could see a New Kids concert, and 2) there was an amazing man out there that would love her, were completely foreign concepts she was always told would never come true for her.
I have loved the New Kids since I was eight-years-old. I will never stop. Every time I get the chance to go to a New Kids concert, it is a spiritual experience for me. It is a physical manifestation of me living the life I've wanted and never thought I could have. It is me celebrating the hard work I did to get myself out of my family and into a more positive place. It is a reward for holding on to hope - for New Kids to get back together, for me to still be alive, for me to have someone who loves me, for me to be my own person, for me to be away from the family who abused me daily. I longed for my own life for so long, and now I have it. People still give me shit for loving the New Kids. They act like anything they say is unique and hilarious, but it's all the same crap I've been hearing since I was eight. I think the thing people don't understand is that the New Kids kept me alive. If it wasn't for their positive influence on my child self, I don't know that I would have survived. They kept me alive and kept me hopeful in a dark, dark place. So going to an NKOTB concert is not just some "nostalgia thing". It isn't me trying to recapture my childhood. It is me honoring who I am, where I came from, and acknowledging every bit of hard work and turns in the road that led me to that moment.
And now that I've gotten that out, let's get to photos!!
What I wore! The tee is from Sparkle By Knight. I bought the 4X Curvy tee. I found the boombox purse (which actually can play music) on Poshmark & the NKOTB patch on eBay. |
Debbie Gibson |
Salt N Pepa's here! |
I love the lights! |
Concert confetti is one of my all time favorite things! |
Do you have a band or artist that makes you feel alive?
I'd love to know who means something to you.
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