I used to work at a store in the Short Hills Mall called Cheers! (Not my exclamation point, just for the record.) Similar to a Hallmark store, but independently owned, Cheers! sold cards, wrapping paper, stationery, t-shirts, mugs, cute widdle stuffed animals, keychains that made gunfire noises, pencils with those odious neon-haired trolls on the top, magnets that said “I don’t mind if you smoke – as long as you don’t mind if I FART,” pads of Post-It notes with Boynton characters on them, Fundies, Betty Boop clocks, tri-state-area tourist paraphernalia of every hue and stripe, and a bunch of other ticky-tack items aimed squarely at the lowest common denominator. Don’t get me wrong – I liked working there, and the store did a land-office business with this stuff, but let’s just say I didn’t take advantage of my employee discount all that often.

Cheers! also specialized in “hot” pop culture, which in 1990 meant the Simpsons, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the New Kids On The Block, and if any company anywhere made anything pertaining to the Simpsons, the Turtles, or the New Kids, the store stocked it. We sold Simpsons t-shirts and notebook covers and pencils and party invitations and “Bartman” posters. We sold Ninja Turtles balloons and snow globes and pencil sharpeners and candy and figurines. We sold New Kids “slam books” and fan calendars and keychains and magnets and drinking glasses party favors and pillowcases. We sales clerks soon came to loathe any cartoon character with pointy yellow hair, any hard-shelled creature that enjoyed pizza, and any acid wash-clad pubescent with even the faintest intention of “hangin’ tough,” but this despicable merchandise literally would not stay on the shelves, and we watched in fascinated disgust as customers pounced on the packages of Turtle Power bendy straws and Donnie Forever trading cards. The hysteria occasionally infected us in spite of ourselves; once, shortly after my promotion to assistant manager, I actually telephoned the main office and screamed at the woman in charge of purchasing, “Do what you have to do, Marcy, but we need more Donatellos out here STAT!” and this other sales clerk Tracey grabbed me by the shoulders and shouted, “Sarah! Get a hold of yourself!” and I shouted back, “Not now, Tracey! Here comes the after-school rush! Everybody – BATTLE STATIONS!” Well, okay, it never got quite that bad, but I did make a panicked phone call when we ran out of Donatellos once, and “situations” could arise over by the t-shirt cubes if two girls wanted the last Joe in an extra-large.

Even at the not-at-all-advanced age of seventeen, I didn’t see the big deal about the New Kids. Of the five Kids, one looked like a fourth-grader, one looked like an ape, one looked like he had gotten dropped on his face as an infant, one looked like Donny Osmond with a perm, and I can’t remember what the last one looked like but I have a feeling the word “ew” would probably cover it. I couldn’t imagine suffering through one of their videos from start to finish without vomiting, much less finding one of them attractive or thinking that the group “rocked.” And as for spending my allowance on a pillowcase festooned with my favorite Kid’s likeness (and, of course, his name in red faux-spray paint letters, for the full “tough but tender” effect) – again I say, “Ew.” But girls a few years younger than I would drop hundreds on New Kids appurtenances without batting an eyelash. I just didn’t get it.

Grunge eventually lopped off the heads of the New Kids, but alas, twice as many heads have predictably sprung up in their places – N’Sync and the Backstreet Boys. Just as dorky, just as unattractively pockmarked with acne, just as unconvincingly attired in the garb of “the streets,” and just as untalented as their humiliated and forgotten predecessors, N’Sync and the Backstreet Boys have updated the moves and the facial hair, but changing the shrink-wrap on the cheese doesn’t turn it into filet mignon. The cheesiness doesn’t matter, of course; boy bands don’t get contracts based on talent, real or pre-fabricated. Boy bands get contracts based on adorability. Boy bands get contracts based on their capacity to make the girls swoon and scream and buy over-priced tie-in merchandise. But, in the case of N’Sync and the Backstreet Boys, I still do not get it. Cute? Adorable? Those shiny, thrusting, hairless little gel monkeys? Why would any female – no matter how young, impressionable, or close to the definition of legal blindness – dream of slow-dancing with a Backstreet Boy? Why would she spend six dollars on, say, AJ’s fan book – will knowing his favorite color and his turn-ons make her life more complete somehow? I mean, whether AJ prefers green or blue, he still has that stupid geometric facial hair, he still dances like a marionette on crystal meth, he still waxes his chest, and he still looks about as tasty as a piece of gristle. Why would anyone develop a crush on this runt? Have the seventh-grade-boy pickings gotten so frightfully slim at American junior high schools that thousands of girls have thrown up their hands in despair and said, “All right – if I have to like a boy, I guess that Nick guy won’t make me barf”? And what about Leonardo DiCaprio? I wrote a column for a UK site recently in which I confessed that I do not understand the whole Leo thing, and I have gotten nothing but hate mail from irate British teens as a result – “how dare you” this, “you don’t know anything about Leo” that. Well, actually, I know two things about Leo: 1) give me five minutes alone with him and a pair of eyebrow tweezers, and you’ll have “Lea,” and 2) you do not make a viable romantic lead if your female co-stars could kill you by sitting on you.

If memory serves, though, these girlish crushes know absolutely no reason. I have no idea how James “The Muppet” Van Der Beek or the Hansons became teen-age pin-ups, but I do remember the white-hot intensity of my kindergarten crush on Greg Brady. Worse, I didn’t swoon for “early Greg,” who, while spindly and freckly, at least showed some promise. Ohhhhh no. I had it bad for the steel wool-coiffed “late Greg,” and neither The Johnny Bravo Incident nor the embarrassing invitation to “dig my groovy pad” could weaken my resolve – I had to have him for my own. Not until I watched Grease did the Brady spell break; I fell hard for John Travolta, and forced my best friend to join me in re-enacting scenes from the movie until we had worn the grooves of the soundtrack album pretty much flat. Tired of playing Rizzo to my Sandy, Agent Weiss threatened to revolt, but my fickle heart had already found a new love object: Superman. I could have done without the spit-curl and the red underpants, but I adored Christopher Reeve nonetheless – at least until the first time I saw The Dukes of Hazzard, at which point my pillow doubled as John Schneider. This brings us up to around fourth grade, and in fourth grade I had a bunch of crushes going at once, all of them based on some element of Friday-night programming – John Schneider, Andy Gibb (Solid Gold), David Hasselhoff (Knight Rider), and Patrick Duffy (Dallas). Sleepover parties of that era frequently turned into battlegrounds, with girls squaring off over who would get to marry Andy Gibb when we grew up. After a brief “ew, boys!” period, I fixated next on Jack Wagner, then of General Hospital. This crush lasted for years and created the most enduring embarrassment (read: possession of not one but both of Wagner’s solo albums) when it finally ended; my family still teases me about my demands for complete silence in the car when “All I Need” came on the radio. Then I graduated to Dennis Quaid, and also to a mediocre relief pitcher for the Mets named Roger McDowell, who I found utterly fetching for reasons that now escape me.

Let’s review. Of the men (or boys) that I lusted after as a girl, one lost all his hair and wound up doing dinner theater; one starred in the Look Who’s Talking films before becoming a Scientologist (and also rather fat); one ended up in a wheelchair; one drank himself to death; one grew a bushy mustache and ran to the forgiving bosom of TNN; one stars on Baywatch and lives off his German royalties – you get the point. I don’t even want to think about what happened to Roger McDowell, or to that kid I had a split-second crush on that used to pop out of the green locker on You Can’t Do That On Television, or to the tennis instructor I had at age twelve whose name I can’t remember. We all know what happened to Jack Wagner (that missing lower tooth, however, remains a mystery). I can’t imagine what I ever found crush-worthy about these people, except maybe Dennis Quaid, but he killed it for me by marrying turbo-twit Meg Ryan anyway.

Do I have a point? Well, I don’t understand how today’s crush objects became crush objects, but maybe I shouldn’t. God knows I don’t see how I ever fell in lust with Roger McDowell, a man who taught Randy Johnson everything he knows about hockey hair and who had stalactites of Skoal accruing to his teeth. Everyone has different tastes, and young girls have bizarre and easily manipulated tastes at best, so even if the Backstreet Boys trigger my gag reflex, I have my own embarrassing list of youthful yearnings.

But at least none of them had geometric facial hair.

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