Death of a fangirl
Birthday recap, 90s Con, "Halfway Around the World", guess the pasta 🛼
Welcome to this weekend edition of Nicstalgia! Hope you had a lovely Divas Week!1 I did – the Eden’s Crush album Popstars is finally on Spotify and Scissor Sisters are going on tour with Kesha!!!! I had a wonderful birthday, adjacent celebratory days, and 35th anniversary of Celine Dion’s debut English-language album, Unison!!!!! Aging is a privilege, and I feel more happy and loved than ever! ❤️
Highlights:
• Wearing a green t-shirt like I did at my surprise 16th birthday party, minus the pink Abercrombie moose insignia and pigtail braids
• Listening to the Starbucks barista sing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on the top of her lungs, à la Chandler Bing, as I claimed my birthday latte
• Hearing four Gilly Hicks songs play out in the wild, enriching the uplifting vibe of the day
• Teaching Elliptica for my friends – Cher’s “Believe” gave the people ENERGY!!!
• Wearing a headset microphone and monochromatic workout outfit in my favorite color and having my friend assume it was an intentional nod to “Oops!…I Did It Again”
• Having my birthday guest book be a deadstock 8x10 stock photo of Hilary Duff from an off-brand dollar store
• Enjoying my birthday food groups: high-quality fruit salad, iced coffee, Praline’s, Carvel ice cream cake, and Prosecco
In today’s issue, you get a dispatch from 90s Con – what I wore, items I collected, my favorite vendors, etc. Paid subs only get Death of a fangirl, a mini essay about the prospect of meeting someone in your Celebrity Crush Pantheon.
Nicstalgia is a reader-supported publication. Huge thank you to the people who go above and beyond to support my work: Janine, Marie, Liv, CY, Chet, Jack, and Matthew! À la Jessica Simpson, I’m gonna love you forever 💐💐💐 If you enjoy Nicstalgia, please consider upgrading so I can continue writing the most fun newsletter about offbeat, obscure, and niche pop culture.
A couple of months ago, I saw a YouTube ad and actually watched all of it! It was a Mean Girls-inspired video for Wild natural deodorant. When they reached out to me, I was excited to make a Mean Girls-inspired video of my own. (It was described by their team as “amazing” and “fantastic”. Yay!) You can use my link here for 20% off. I got the Ginger & Lemon scent, because ginger is my other favorite UK export, and the pink case because – duh.
“We started filming a music video [set to “Halfway Around the World” by A*Teens] in 2001 and finally finished it 23 years later.” Wow, this is my new favorite music video and a journey I truly enjoyed taking. Shoutout to my Instagram algo for getting me there.
Speaking of which, sometimes you see a video and think…this makes no sense, but it also does. And you just get it? Yeah so Josh Peck being the lead singer of Los Lonely Boys is one of those instances that seems equally probable and improbable.
“Can't stop thinking about the amount of choreo in S Club 7’s mid tempo ballad ‘Natural’” is the exact kind of sentence that would come out of my mouth. I’m pleased to share that the majority of the choreo they did in their concert last year was the same routine as what I’d memorized back in 2001.
Can you guess the pasta? They pronounced most of them wrong but I am impressed with the high level of pasta shape recognition. You should’ve seen the way I was screaming BUCATINI into my phone.
I really love that Timbalanding has become a verb. Shoutout to Shock Value, which came out on my 17th birthday 18 years ago (what).
DIY but make it Boston: Take a sweatshirt and add a lobster smokin a butt and drinkin Dunks. (Btw they opened a TITS in West Hartford, CT. The legacy lives on.)
“Shoutout to soft blue - gotta be one of my favorite aesthetics” This prominent Y2K hue is icy blue or frosty blue, and it’s a color not an aesthetic, but yes, agreed.
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I come back stronger than a 90s trend
Last weekend was my second time at 90s Con in Hartford. Obviously, I had to stop at Perkatory, my favorite/hometown coffee shop. Yes, both of the drinks I got over the weekend were topped with edible glitter. Why not? I wore my kitschy little pink gummy bear necklace without knowing what the volunteer shirt looked like, and coincidentally, the mascot was a bear! Cute! Day 2, I wore my VHS earrings from South Street Art Mart – But I’m a Cheerleader and Can’t Hardly Wait.
Physical Media Renaissance™
There are tons of cool vendors at 90s Con who sell nostalgic merchandise, vintage toys and games, and more. Even the Goosebumps illustrator was there, which I thought was delightful despite having had terrifying childhood nightmares about that ventriloquist dummy. I was excited to see Nicole & Nicole from South Street Art Mart, makers of my iconic Fiona Apple light switch, and Larisa from Larisa Styles it All, who had a super fun VHS selection. I wiped out the Mary-Kate & Ashley section simply because I could!2 Now I just need to get a VHS player…
This is how we do it
The celebrity lineup at 90s Con is always top tier. The most popular franchise was absolutely Scream, in addition to convention mainstays like the Saved By the Bell.34 There’s an area of the convention center floor where celebrities have tables next to one another. Fans form queues and wait in line, sometimes for hours, to meet their favorite celebrity. Fans pay somewhere around $40-$60 for each selfie or autograph, which is often discounted when bundled. There are also separate group photo opportunities, where you can meet the cast of a particular show or movie.
Death of a fangirl
I’ve always been intense about things I love, and the world has made me feel guilty, desperate, overly eager, or too try-hard because of it. I’ve been a fangirl many a time but deeply resented the label’s connotation. It infantilizes women and girls and reductively describes their fervent passions, niche interests, and intellectual pursuits as frivolous and hysterical. After years of researching the psychology of fandom and being a digital ethnographer inside of a particularly rabid and infamous fanbase, I’ve found that there absolutely are many fans who are weird, maladjusted, socially awkward, delulu, too online, etc.5 But I think it’s deeply unfair to describe fans – especially ones who can politically mobilize and make a positive impact on their communities online and offline – as a gendered monolith.
Growing up going to dance conventions, I know the feeling of meeting someone you idolize, whose talent you admire, and whose work impacted your own life or artistry in ways that you couldn’t even articulate.6 Fans experience profound reverence, emotional resonance, and sometimes romantic attraction for celebrities that propel them atop a nearly indestructible societal pedestal. These parasocial relationships between fans and their objects of admiration are charged with an intense energy. In the case of 90s Con, this palpable electricity lasts several decades after the peak of the celebrity’s cultural impact. There was one person in particular who I felt torn about meeting in-person.
Matthew Lawrence, the middle Lawrence Brother, was always in the Top 3 of my Late 90s/Early 2000s Celebrity Crush Pantheon, alongside Freddie Prinze Jr. and Josh Hartnett, before Heath Ledger in the mid 00s, followed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the late 00s. The Lawrence Brothers had been to 90s Con before, when Matthew met his current partner, Chili from TLC. (I always want the best for her!) I couldn’t wait to see Matthew with my own eyes.7 On the last day of the convention, I walked by his table. He was so handsome, wearing glasses, dressed unassumingly. There was no line. It was my chance – the moment Middle School Me would’ve dreamed about. Did I owe it to my younger self to at least go over and say hi? I guess I didn’t have to tell him I had a huge crush on him. When would I ever have this chance again? The picture would come out so cute!!
I couldn’t do it. I kept walking.
Something had shifted within me. Was the fangirl part of me dead? There was no nervousness, no racing heartbeat, no particular excitement, and no anxiety around how I’d be perceived. There was just a sense of calm and almost mild disgust or pity for how excited Younger Me would have been. I looked at Matthew and all of these celebrities and thought, “Good for them.” The first time I felt this sense of detachment was when I met Geri Halliwell a year and a half ago. I was actually shocked as to how “normal” I was in the moment. Although I do love celebrity book signings and enjoy meeting people who have made a cultural impact, I’ve substantially matured and mellowed out. The contrived environment of a fan convention made me feel uncomfortable, and the fan-celebrity power imbalance is not one I care to partake in. I’ve also realized that I deeply value connection, knowing, and being known; actors by trade are unknowable people, and that makes the shiny veneer of their personal brand lose its appeal.
I was definitely starstruck as a kid, and in 2018 when I sat next to Justin Timberlake at a restaurant, but now I don’t care about celebrities so much as I am fascinated by how our society upholds fame and fortune as vehicles of power and status. These people – whether actors or rockstars – play make believe, pretend to be someone else, and reach the top of a sociocultural pyramid that earns them admiration, respect, and love. And also lots of money! That is why people worship celebrities; they represent the fullest expressions of human desire, whether it be fear, loathing, or love. These people, who often epitomize ideal beauty standards, are beneficiaries of broken systems and rank higher than you within carefully constructed hierarchies. They act as the clean slate onto which normies can project those desires for fame, fortune, adoration, approval, or acceptance, but stars really are just like us.
Matthew Lawrence is probably a lovely person, but I can’t say that my life would have changed had I met him. I wasn’t hoping to be seen, or validated, or chosen. I just wanted to eat my soft pretzel in peace. They say never to meet your heroes, but my biggest relief is no longer needing one.8
You heard about it here first, before Harper’s Bazaar, by the way!
The Olsen Twins movies getting taken off streaming is a crime against humanity.
Matthew Lillard is about his bags and I respect him for that. Some celebs (e.g. Mark-Paul Gosselaar) just sign random shit and forget to have people pay, but Matthew was on business! His and Skeet Ulrich’s lines were absolutely packed all weekend.
Mark-Paul, Elizabeth Berkeley, and Mario Lopez all looked glowing and snatched per usual. Fabulous. I popped into their panel right at the snippet where they talked about not having animosity with late costar Dustin Diamond. Kinda funny how PEOPLE can literally make an article about every sentence! The content machine never stops!
The word delulu actually originated within the kpop community.
There will be an essay in my book about me being the #1 fangirl for a particular choreographer. Stay tuned…
I’m kinda okay with just looking at someone and walking by, as opposed to meeting or interacting with them. Was cool to see Rose McGowan again, and Brian Austin Green because he is handsome. In terms of looks, the fan consensus was in favor of Skeet Ulrich.
Well, except for Celine Dion.
Love South Street Art Mart! I bought a pair of Bound DVD earrings from there