At any rate, Hartford did not look like a possibility. So, the announcement came, and we shrugged and accepted our fate. There would be no more Hanson for us that summer. And then my mom's boyfriend did a cruel thing. He was sitting on my couch one Sunday, watching a random sports event, when the following words came out of his mouth…

"Hey. I heard that Hanson is coming to Connecticut. How come you guys aren't going?"

Now, you have to understand the dynamic of our Hanson situation at the time. None of us (When I say us, I mean the fearsome four, Me, my friend Corinne, my sister Stefanie and her best friend Meghan.) had discussed the Hartford concert at length. We knew that we wouldn't be able to go, so why make the situation more painful by continually rehashing the dismal facts? We didn't have the money. We had no transportation. The concert was less than three weeks away, so tickets were probably gone anyway. And as those very words came out of my mouth, something occurred to me. If the show was sold out, we could finally put the issue to bed. No tickets. No concert. End of story. And there was only one way to find out for sure. I picked up the phone. I called Ticketmaster.

They still had tickets.

And with those words, our lives suddenly tilted off their collective axis. We had to go. Suddenly I had a vision of myself sitting on my couch on the night of the concert, panicked because I was packing off to college a week later, sad because I wasn't seeing Hanson, in a pair of sweats watching television. Suddenly staying home became an impossibility.

My mother said no before I even hung up the phone. I'm not driving. That's too far away. I have to work the next morning. A Phyllis reaction to the core. Now you have to understand. I love my mother. She's the coolest person on this planet, but she truly lacks any sort of spontaneous imagination. She has no patience for any kind of irrationality, especially mine. Seeing this, we went into Stealth Mode.

Corinne, my sister and I retired to my bedroom. We took one thing with us. The Yellow Pages. For the first time in my life, I became a crafty person. We started calling people, the first one being, of course, Meghan. If we could figure it out, she was in. Of course she was in. It's Meghan. Then we called another friend who was and remains a lukewarm Hanson fan. That's not an insult at all. She just genuinely enjoys the music and lacks our slightly obsessive qualities. She said she'd come. So now we had five people. One person closer to affordability. Then we started calling limousine companies in town. After calling at least ten places, we actually found one that was within financial reach. They gave us a quote. We divided the cost. After factoring in the cost of the tickets, it actually seemed like a possibility. Two hours later, we came downstairs with prices and dates scribbled on napkins.

We sat down on the couch and calmly told my mother that we'd figured the whole thing out, without her help, thank you very much, and that it was now fully possible for us to see Hanson in Hartford with a minimal amount of pain on her part. Ken smiled. Mom smiled. We had won.

I got the tickets on Monday. They were quite literally, as close to the ceiling as one can possibly get at the Civic Center without actually violating some sort of low flight laws. I can't say I was disappointed. Ten minutes earlier, we weren't even going. Now we were not only going, we were going to have a styling ride on top of it.

The next task was to drop off the deposit for the limo. Well, when I told my grandfather the address, he casually mentioned that it wasn't in the best part of town. I didn't think much of it. Most of my town is a bad part of town. You can imagine my surprise when I saw the dirt encrusted alleyway that was home to my illustrious limousine company. There was an open garage that housed not only the cars, but a host of sweaty oil streaked men. Feeling incredibly self-conscious, I asked one of them where, exactly, I was to drop off a deposit on a limo. He smiled, called me dear and pointed up a dark staircase. I went up it slowly, contemplating the names of horror movies that had similar opening scenes. At the top of the stairs was a room with a desk. Occupying the chair was a woman in a pair of shredded cutoff shorts and a fluorescent green t-shirt. She had quite possibly, the highest self-supported hair I'd seen since 1987, and she was eating a sandwich and talking on the phone in the most pronounced Boston accent I've ever heard, her feet propped up on another chair. She wasn't wearing any shoes.

When she saw me come in, she waved at me and indicated that she'd be with me in a minute. When she got off the phone, she had mayonnaise on her lip. Somehow, I mustered up enough courage to fork over nearly one hundred dollars cash to this woman. When all was said and done, we would have a limo with a CD player. We could only drink if we were of age, but I suspected she wasn't the type to snitch us out, should we try anything of that nature. I had her repeat the details to me three times…

"The Hanson Brothers in Hartford Connecticut on July 31. Pickup at 4:00. Car 2. Five people." She called them The Hanson Brothers all three times.

And with that, it was official. I guess I should have known better. My bargain hunting had to have some repercussions. Of course, I hadn't realized they'd be quite so grave. From that day on, our chauffeurs for the evening would be known as "Ghetto Limo Inc."

The limo driver couldn't find my house. That's how the evening started. It was 3:56 PM and there was no sign of anything, much less a limousine coming down my street. Everyone was at my house, fretting over how much money they should be bringing and the tip for the driver. Then the phone rang.

"Hi. This is Joe. I'm the limo driver. I can't find you." Apparently he'd been driving around my neighborhood for the last fifteen minutes. I took the portable phone and walked out onto my front lawn, thinking that if he couldn't spot us, I could surely spot him. I looked down one end of the street, then the other. Sure enough, I saw the limo drive right by the street.

"You just missed us! It's the street you just drove past!" I think I probably shrieked into the phone. At this point, my nerves were getting to that pre-Hanson concert state of general agitation.

And then, a few moments later, after I gave a few more directions, our transportation emerged from around the corner. Now, to the best of my knowledge, any limousine constructed after 1993 or so has rather pretty aerodynamic lines and little lights along the sides and a blindingly shiny surface. As Car 2 came down my street, the only thing I could think of were the limousines at my aunt's wedding in which I had served as a flower girl. That's exactly what Car 2 looked like. My aunt got married on March 8, 1988.

It was white. OK, maybe it was off-white. And it was incredibly square looking. None of the sleek lines of the new cars were to be found anywhere. I even think it had that triangular shaped wing thing on the back that's just for decoration, that I think they stopped putting on limos when Reagan left office.

We were all standing on the lawn at this point. I think there might have even been some arm waving. At any rate, our ride had arrived. And then Joe stepped out of the front seat. It is in these moments that I am grateful for my levelheaded mother. She was very good. She didn't say a word. He was bald. Not a hair on his head. And he was huge. Huge in every direction. He was tall. He had a particularly big neck. He also had quite a pronounced cleft in his chin. The entire effect, black and white uniform included, was somewhere between Jesse Ventura and a particularly big rodent. He said hello, asked which one of us was Laura and proceeded to open the back door for us. Shocked silence from my mother.

After all, he seemed harmless enough, even if his look was rather imposing. We headed for the open door. It was then that we bore first witness to Car 2's finest quality. Lining the floor of the car was the handsomest royal blue shag carpeting I had ever seen. It was long and hairy and decidedly ratty. I think we started to giggle as soon as the door closed. My mom was petrified. Now you girls be careful. Things of that nature.

But we were actually going to see Hanson. As nasty as the surroundings were, there was a strange, tacky element of cool in it. I'd wager we had the oldest, (read: vintage!) grossest limousine at that concert. Somewhere in there, is something to be proud of.

We weren't even out of my town yet when we realized that Joe would be cool. He stopped at the first convenience store. We had no idea what he was doing in there, but at the time, I think we were agitated that our ride was being interrupted because Joe needed to stop for twinkies.

But Joe didn't stop for twinkies. Ten minutes later, out of the store he came, bearing chips and cans of soda. For us. No kidding. Joe bought us munchies. We loved him from that moment on.

He asked us questions about Hanson, a subject on which Joe was pretty ignorant, but we set him straight quickly enough. I mean, after all, we wanted to show him what exactly he was getting into. We played Middle of Nowhere for him. (We got our CD player, as promised!) He enjoyed it, but said he liked the Backstreet Boys better. We thought this was disappointing, but what can you do?

Now, for this show, the only signs we brought were for the limousine. More specifically, they were to bother commuters with. My sister had an orange one that said HANSON OR MMMBUST, which is pretty fun, in an odd, teenie sort of way. We took turns holding it out the windows of the limo on the highway. It's amazing the looks of disgust, shock and just utter bewilderment you get from people when you do things like that. Then we got to the tollbooth.

Pulling into the tollbooth, my sister thought it would be fun to take advantage of people's open windows to shout Hanson related things at them. I think she asked a couple of guys in a beat up Chevy if they liked Hanson. I think they said Hanson sucks. Then she decided to ask the tollbooth operator. He said he liked classic rock. I'm not sure if that's an answer. Of course, Joe was trying to get directions from this very tollbooth operator as Stefanie did this. If he was upset, he didn't show it.

So we wreaked Hanson-loving havoc as Hartford grew nearer. We gorged ourselves on chips. We played Hanson and Admiral Twin. We sang. It was such a general party. Joe thought we were cool. We actually got lost, which was sort of interesting, because it brought us through some oddly suburban Connecticut neighborhoods in which we shouted things at people who happened to be outside at the time. By this point, Joe was so into helping us, he would slow down when we passed people so we could shout more economically.

I don't know how, but we made it to downtown Hartford. It soon became quite apparent that we were not the only ones with the Civic Center as our destination. All of a sudden, we were surrounded by cars of smiling parents and giddy sign carrying girls. Somewhere we found a marker in the limo. On the back of the Hanson or Mmmbust sign that had served us so well, Stefanie wrote "HONK IF YOU ::heart:: HANSON" and held it out the window of the limo. There was a most glorious symphony of car horns in every direction. You know, in a world that has such hostile feelings toward these boys, that was a beautiful moment.

We made it. We were there. We piled out of the limo in what was a very Hard Day's Night kind of moment and just looked around dumbfounded.

"What kind of seats do you have?" Joe's question was an innocent enough one. He looked a little disappointed when we told him. All this way, with a limousine even, for those tickets? "I'll try to get you better seats." I don't know if we laughed or what, but we didn't want to think about the inferior quality of our seats, not at that moment. So we shrugged, planned a place to meet after the show, and went inside.

I don't know why, but Stefanie and Megan wandered off somewhere. I think they actually had to go to the bathroom, so they decided to take a walk through the adjoining hotel to find one. It was the last time we saw them before the start of the concert. So, the remaining three of us stood in the obnoxiously large lines and waited to get into the Center. I don't know if or when we started to worry, but we were standing there as the clock inched closer to 7:00. It seemed odd that so many people were just standing around outside the arena so close to the scheduled start of the show, but we waited anyway. Finally, after several moments of deliberation, we decided to switch lines and edge our way into the arena any way possible.

We did, leaving many a Hanson fan behind us. To this day, I have no idea what was holding things up, but I'm glad we left when we did, because it gave us just enough time to get lost. We went to the completely wrong side of the arena. Now, I was starting to worry for two reasons. First of all, the show would be starting very soon, and we had yet to find our seats. Second of all, we hadn't seen Stef or Meg in a while. We blundered around. We felt like we were walking in circles. I'm quite sure we got wrong directions from at least one security guard. That was when the music started.

The opening chords of 'Box Under His Bed' caused a mild wave of pandemonium in the groups of likewise seatless girls around us, mild of course, because it wasn't Hanson. But I sure panicked. I swore. We scrambled. We rushed around. Finally, by an act of God alone I think, we found the right entrance.

That's when we started to climb. Up and up in the darkness as Admiral Twin roared at one end of the arena. I wanted desperately to stop and watch them while we were low enough to see their faces, but we had to get to our seats. We climbed for an eternity, my heart sinking slightly lower with every step up. It was obvious that we wouldn't be able to see this show in too much detail.

Stefanie and Meghan beat us to the seats. When we arrived, they were both bouncing happily along to the music, absolutely oblivious to the fact that their original party consisted of five people and not two. They glanced at us once and kept dancing. I felt loved. We tried to talk to them, to comment on the seats, on the fact that we'd lost them for an hour, on our ordeal in the line. They ignored us.

We settled in quickly enough and enjoyed the remainder of Admiral Twin's set. Having been dazzled by the boys at Great Woods two months earlier, I had bought the CD and promptly booted copies for the girls. (Don't get nervous. We all own official copies now.) Now, seeing them and knowing their names and being familiar with their music, it was a much more pleasant experience. We knew we'd be upset if they didn't play Fiji Fandango and Dancin' on the Sun. We wanted Brad to play his accordion. We sang. We shouted. Being an educated consumer is good. In fact, at one point, one of the little girls behind us poked me in the back and said "Are you guys going to scream for Hanson too?" We kindly nodded yes and continued to dance. They did indeed play Fiji Fandango and Dancin' on the Sun. They also played Clever St. Willy, which made us dance and caused a general amount of celebration in our row, considering we'd never heard it before and just thought it sounded cool. Then Admiral Twin ended their set.

Now, I have to say, seeing Hanson at the Civic Center was quite a different experience from seeing them at an outdoor venue like Great Woods. There's an inescapable mayhem about seeing them indoors, a feeling of being totally engulfed by a screaming crowd. To me, it's more exciting. There are people everywhere. People upon level of people, in every direction. Plus, the darkness adds something, a kind of mystery to the proceedings. At Great Woods, the crowd has room to move, places to go, concession stands to distract them, a place to actually get away from the music. At the Civic Center, if you were in the building, you were seeing Hanson and not doing much else. Trapped in a room with Hanson. Not an unpleasant feeling at all.

The lights came up after Admiral Twin. We surveyed the scene. We were, quite literally, three rows from the ceiling. Two seconds from nosebleed. It almost gave you the feeling that you might tumble off at any moment, that you could let your attention lapse for one instant, and suddenly wind up in the next tier down. A little scary? Maybe.

Now, let it be known that at the time, I didn't have a MOE card. I know. Shame on me. (I have since forked over the cash and gotten one. FYI.) So I knew there would be no breathtaking backstage experience for me. For Meg and Stef however, it was their supreme goal. They had talked to people online. They had figured out what to do, how to act, where to place themselves and who to look for so that it would be foolish on Hanson's part if they didn't let them backstage. They spent this time looking for a man. A man who supposedly held the coveted passes. Their eyes scanned all levels of the arena. The first thing they saw, that we all saw, was Joe.

He was climbing the steps, coming up to see us, his bald head contrasting with the pony-tailed ones around him. I think, for a minute, we were speechless. "How did you get in?!"

"Oh, a scalper gave me a ticket." Gave. The word rang in my head for a second. No one gives you Hanson tickets. That's when Stefanie and Meghan spotted the man.

He was in the section directly to the left of us, and he had a venue pass around his neck, and there was a small group of girls crowding around him as he stood in an aisle. They started to contemplate who he could be, and what to do. He obviously was someone of interest. Maybe he was the guy with the passes. We regarded his presence for a minute, forgetting about Joe, until he asked me what we were discussing. Stefanie and Megan started to get frantic. I told Joe the situation, and how Stefanie and Meghan had MOE cards and thought he might be the man giving out backstage passes. He calmly looked at me. "I'll go check it out. Hold on."

We watched as calmly as possible as Joe walked over, pushed past the small squealing crowd that had formed around the man, and started to have what looked like a conversation with him. A minute later, Joe shook the man's hand and headed back over. Whatever had just ensued, it looked positive. That's when we noticed that he was returning with something in his hands. They weren't passes. They were tickets.

He came back to our row and said the six words that will forever mark that night in my history. "Girls. We're going to the floor."

We didn't spaz. OK, maybe we spazzed for two seconds. But we quickly realized that the tickets were probably of questionable origin and spazzing like a maniac and drawing undue attention to ourselves would not be an intelligent thing to do.

So we didn't stay to consider it. We just moved. We were going down. Down and down, past the balcony and the lower levels. The journey was a frantic one. We were whispering in every direction. Rip the stub off the ticket. What row is this? Don't freak out! I can't even believe this.

The next thing we knew, we were on the floor of the Hartford Civic Center, standing next to girls who had scalped tickets and rich daddies and record company connections. We were twenty-five rows from the stage, closer than our Great Woods seats by nearly ten rows. We were dead center. After a few minutes of gasping and muted squealing and shuffling, we were in our seats. They were beautiful. The silver curtain billowed ahead, so much closer than we had ever imagined. We had arrived. There was scarcely a minute to look around, to figure out how we had just gone from up there to down here. A second after we got our places, the lights went down.

The arena erupted. The very sound, the sheer volume of it electrified the air in the room. Lights behind the curtain went on, swirling in every direction as the intro to Gimme Some Lovin started, quietly at first, then becoming more urgent. That's when it happened. Whoever had been running the lights decided to add some more drama to the moment and drew one of the big spotlights across the right side of the stage. Suddenly a mammoth shadow appeared on the curtain, two, three stories high. It was Taylor. Suddenly everyone was standing on their chairs, arms in the air. I started to cry. I immediately felt like a big dork, and it wasn't crying really… just a frenetic tightening of my chest that sort of made me gasp and sputter for a minute. In all of five minutes I had gone from being happy but slightly resigned to absolutely ecstatic. The force of it nearly knocked me over.

That was the night we all fell in love with Isaac. Now, it is true that we'd all had a soft spot for him before Hartford, but when the curtain fell that night, any remaining traces of awkward little-boy Isaac were gone. In his place stood a tall, utterly confident rock star. It was amazing really. A telltale sign that the transition was complete? After two songs, Isaac's shirt came off. A year before, Isaac wore clothes so baggy, you seriously wondered how many other people he could be hiding in there. And there he was, standing on a stage in front of thousands, in a black t-shirt with a fit that even Taylor would be proud of.

Oh, and a brief word regarding Taylor's attire for the evening. It was the same thing he wore at Great Woods. Now Taylor, you must understand that it was all the same people who went to these concerts. See, the first one was in New England. The second one was in New England. Same general area. Same people. We have good memories. We remember these things. Not that I'm complaining. Taylor could do a show in a brown sack and look fabulous.

And Zachary? Well, he was obscured for most of the evening behind a rather bothersome cymbal that happens to reside on the top of his drum set. Going to see Hanson is a fun time, but if you're on the floor, don't have your heart set on seeing Zac for too much of the evening.

Musically, the thing that stood out at this show was the acoustic set. Really, I don't recall ever hearing them sound so tight, so musically 'on'. Of course, it's an impressive part of the show anyway, the most genuine illustration of Hanson's considerable musical chops. But really, every second of it was just beautiful. And then of course there was More Than Anything. I'm not even sure I can put together cohesive thoughts when it comes to this song. I stood there, not wanting to move, lest I shatter. I remember the weight in my chest as Isaac sang. And then you start having thoughts like… Does love like that actually exist? When Isaac says it, I believe him. It's a nice thing to think about.

The show flew. Really. The whole proceedings seemed so painfully short. One minute they were there, causing the loudest, most sincere amount of mayhem I've seen in a crowd in a long time, and then they were gone.

It's nice to know that they're human. That they breathe and exist somewhere in flesh and blood. For a second, we existed in the same place for the same moment. I'm happy with that. It's nice to know they want to share their gift, to actually stand in front of the faithful and give back. And to think that three boys could do that, that they could be the bearers of so much happiness to so many people.

We made our way out, slightly dazed, still glowing from the random events that had brought us from high to low and back again. Joe stood outside the door, patiently waiting for us, as if nothing had happened. Apparently he had spent the remainder of the show ushering little girls from the balcony to unoccupied seats on the floor. He was truly a Hanson Robin Hood. He recounted the events as we walked back to Car2. But before we got there, Joe made us sing. On the way to the show, we had sat in the back of the limo singing Hanson songs (namely Where's the Love) in three part harmony. We aren't the tightest vocal group that ever was, but it's fun. Joe happened to think we were good. In fact, Joe had us sing in the parking lot in front of the Civic Center for another limo driver who he had apparently made friends with during the show. It was an odd moment. I'm surprised no one threw change at us.

We sang the whole way home actually, still rather dazed from all that had transpired. We weren't out of Hartford yet when Joe asked the question. "Where are they playing next?"

I forget who answered. "New York."

Joe's response was immediate… "Well, get your mom's credit card. We'll go to New York." I think we probably laughed. It had taken a miracle and some serious planning to pull this off. I don't think Phyllis could handle New York. Not yet anyway.

Corinne was lucky. On the day of the release, she found one of the ignorant music stores in Boston that put the video on the shelves simultaneously with the live CD. I came home for the weekend specifically to celebrate.

We were at my house, watching it for what must have been the fourth time that night, when suddenly we realized something. For a nanosecond, in the intro to Gimme Some Lovin, there was a shot of the stage from far away. In the audience, there was a girl holding a sign that was illuminated by Christmas lights.

Now it's probably necessary to rewind here for a minute. At the Great Woods concert, we brought a sign with Christmas lights on it. It was a gigantic MOE symbol and for whatever reason, Zac saw it and made some random comment. "Yeah, I see your sign" or something equally as generic, but exciting nonetheless. Sitting next to us at that show were two girls from Connecticut. I don't remember if they commented about our sign, but they obviously thought it was a pretty good idea. Because at Hartford, when we got to our shiny new seats on the floor, these same two girls were literally, in the row in front of us. And they stole our idea for the sign. They had the Hanson symbol in Christmas lights on a sign. And it's a darn good thing they did.

On the Road to Albertane video, we saw their sign. And we immediately knew we were in the shot. We rewound it. We paused it. The whole moment doesn't last any longer than two seconds. We played it in slow motion. Then we found it. The magic frame. For an instant, the lights came up. And there we were. A bouncing row of five heads. My yellow t-shirt. My sister's curly hair, suspended in mid-boing. My arms stretched above my head in what must have been an ecstatic moment, doing that decidedly Laura thing that they do. Corinne's short hair contrasting against the sea of sunny ponytails around her. A corner of Meghan. An inch or two of Carly. And it lasts for one frame. But it's proof. Proof that we stood there, that Joe and the tickets and the limo ride, that all of it actually happened, on a Sunday night in August, the night before the first day of school. It's proof that I cried during More Than Anything, that me and Hanson and a couple of people who I love like my sisters were all in the same moment, toge ther. That for once, we were all in the very same frame.

And someone, Walker, Ashley Greyson maybe, caught it for posterity. That nanosecond, that one frame, is for my children. Sounds schmaltzy, I know. But that's what it is. I can point to that and say without any hesitation, "That's me. I was there."

So I'm not sure about this story. The cardinal rule of writing is "Know thy audience." I'm not sure if I know who that is.

Now that I look at it, I see that it's not really a story about Hanson. Hanson is the backdrop, the circumstance. The story, the real story, is about us. It's about all the times we've called Taylor's clothes ugly and laughed about Ike's goofiness and pondered what Zac will look like in five years. The one constant in there, is the "we". I hear a lot from people who don't have friends who like Hanson, who have to keep quiet when they're in "mixed company" for fear that they might be criticized. I am lucky. I have people to share this with. This story is a piece of our history. This story is a celebration of us. For Corinne, Meghan and Stefanie: When it comes down to what it really comes down to, this story is for you.