Pop Music : New Kids Preside at Rite of Passage

Remember those stadium-filling weddings the Rev. Sun Myung Moon used to perform? Something similar happened on Friday at the New Kids on the Block show at Dodger Stadium. But it was more like a mass bas mitzvah or a confirmation, as thousands of pre- and barely pubescent girls experienced a major modern rite of passage: their first pop concert.

The shrieking, the staging, the lasers, the fireworks, the heavily pitched souvenirs, what could be heard of the music and--most importantly--the puppy-love sex-tease of the New Kids, bare-chested and wiggling their rears. . . . It’ll all be part of the conversations that Nychol Thornton, 13, and her sister Jennifer, 12, said would fill the schoolyard at Sandberg Junior High in Glendora today. (For the record, both said they like hard rockers Faith No More better, but that their favorite New Kids are Jonathan and Joe, respectively.)

Of course, this was also a rite of passage for many accompanying parents. Some marked the occasion by waiting glumly in the parking lot, others sitting silently with their children, bemused and/or perturbed, with fingers in ears. But Anthony and Anita Marco of Lomita beamed proudly as daughter Mandy, 10, jumped and clapped and screamed.

“I’ve never seen her unwind like this,” said her dad. He reminisced about his first pop concert--a late-’60s Santana show in Philadelphia--and from his parental perspective was glad that Mandy had this relatively innocent setting for her initiation.

“The New Kids are leading them in a safe direction,” he said. “These kids can loosen up without all the cultural things we went through in the ‘60s and ‘70s.”

They also did it without the food fights of their older siblings that marred concerts here by Depeche Mode last month and the Cure last summer. But just wait until adolescence sets in.