A conversation with me could merely be three minutes and somehow the Backstreet Boys would come up. Don’t ask me how, it just happens. It’s a love that started in 5th grade and lasted well, how old am I today? However, there was a period of my life when I pushed them aside for a new type of music.
Middle school was about to come to an end, I looked like this, my friends would soon branch out of our little circle, and the Hot Topic mall punk of Good Charlotte and New Found Glory would soon lead me (and a ton of others my age) down an EMOtional rabbit hole, and while Quinn Allman of The Used was my #1 from the moment I saw him in high school, I felt that today I had to pay homage to an emo crush that is sort of like royalty in that scene, and that’s Mikey Way of My Chemical Romance.
Much like Backstreet Boys’ Nick Carter, Mikey Way had adorable hair, and if we were to assign MCR the stereotypical boy band tropes – he’d be the baby. So my heart (and hormones) were locked in on the bespeckled bassist towards the end of high school, and that heart was overjoyed when my friends and I got tickets to Nintendo Fusion in the fall of 2004. MCR was actually an opener on the bill (insane when you think that months later they’d make MILLIONS in merch at Warped Tour). I remember standing in line and seeing Mikey Way waiting for a cab or something.
Yes, youths reading this – Uber and Lyft weren’t always around. I was obsessed with his two-toned glasses, but alas was too damn shy to walk up and say hello. And again, by the following summer, it was damn near impossible to get that close to anyone in that band of Emo Gawds.
Don’t act like I didn’t try. I went to many MCR shows after that and each one left me more enamored with Mikey Way. That boy spent years in my top 10 crushes but I think today, he’s headed off to retirement alongside Joel Madden, that old gateway crush. In many ways, I treat those old emo crushes like I do the music, like old friends I’m thankful to have known. Of course, there are some bands from that time that I am still a huge fan of today, but a lot – I listen back to the music and can’t help but think damn gurl. That’s a bit much. Which is how I viewed my crushes on a lot of dudes from bands at that time; too fucking extra. I can’t believe I acted like that towards those dudes at that time.
However, some years ago I was waiting in line at another venue in LA and there was Mikey Way. It was my first fall living in the city as a non-student and I’d just won tickets to see ‘It’s Always Sunny’ perform ‘The Nightman Cometh’ and there he was, and there my heart went. Those emo boys (and emo music), they’ll always have some sort of hold on me. Unlike last time though, I actually did go up to him and while the conversation wasn’t about his glasses as those were long gone, I did get a picture and later actually performed for him as I won the second part of the prize, a part in the play! So I like to say that Mikey Way paid to see me perform one time…no big deal.
Crushgasm 