My name is Margaret Jo Michaels, and so help me God, if you call me anything besides Meg... But never mind that now.
When I was 18, I loved a boy band. When I was 30, I spent a week with them.
I was about to start college when I found them. Too old to love them the way I did, I was the same age as their youngest member. I raised the average age at their concerts, or would have if it weren't for their parents. I bought their CDs, consumed their fans' breathy Geocities tributes in those early days of the Web. I even wrote a little fan fiction, when I wasn't up to my eyeballs in school writing assignments, amazed at the age difference between me and these young girls writing online with no thought of what even high school held.
I knew it was silly, and I gave it up as those last vestiges of high school silliness that marked me as a freshman were lost over the next few years in the faux enlightenment of college: the indie rock, the late-night weed-fueled philosophizing, the soon-ragged Hunter S. Thompson tomes that sat next to my college journalism textbooks. The teenybopper was swallowed up by the rough-edged, hard-nosed journalist, the tough girl going out to change the world with pen and steno pad in hand: Meg Michaels, champion of the free press and butt-kicker at large.
College gave way to the real world and the journalist's idealism-masked-as-cynicism with which I faced it. With degree in hand from a prestigious journalism school in unlikely Missouri, just a couple hours' drive from my hometown in rural Illinois, I got a job with an alt-weekly magazine in St. Louis and labored for my chance to join the venerable staff of Rolling Stone, which came at last a week before my 28th birthday. Here I was alongside legends of the pop culture journalism world. But here also, as a way of coping with the heavy-handed cynicism at Rolling Stone and in New York, I had no choice but to seek out sources of light in the big city. I started taking pictures, looking for beauty. I found a place on a quiet street on the tippy-tip of Staten Island, the unlikeliest of the five boroughs. And as I was given more opportunities to enterprise my work, to seek out stories rather than always being handed them, I developed a heart for the comeback. For the stars that rose and fell and began a slow climb back up again.
And that was how I ended up with the boys on the bus.