Title: The Day I Became a Teenage Girl

By: A.E. McNeel

Written for Writers Read’s “My American Song” live performance on June 14, 2026

Theater 555, West 42nd Street, New York City, NY, USA

Part of Carnegie Hall’s United in Sound: America at 250 festival

It was August 23rd, 1997. I had technically been a teenager for nine months already, having turned 13 the prior November. But I was wholly unaware and out of touch with how bad of a job I was doing at being a teenage girl up until that point. I didn’t (yet) have a stack of Tiger Beat magazines in my room. I didn’t (yet) have cassette tapes full of boy band songs recorded from the radio on my boom box. My bedroom walls were not (yet) plastered with posters of “teen heart throbs.” I had no interest in any of the Backstreet Boys—I know, gasp.

But that was all about to change in an “MmmBop.” On Saturday, August 23rd 1997, the living room television was on while I walked from one side of the house to the other—most likely going from my bedroom to the garage with my Discman, which contained a CD of Whitney Houston’s BodyGuard soundtrack. I was going to put on my rollerblades for the day, and I would be out “interpretive dance rollerblading” in my driveway for hours and roaming around the neighborhood until the sun went down.

But, as I walked by, the melody coming from the TV struck me somewhere deep in my yet to be unearthed teenage girl core. I heard the words:

“You have so many relationships in this life
Only one or two will last
You go through all the pain and strife
Then you turn your back, and they're gone so fast.”

Oh, 14-year-old Taylor Hanson, I did not know at the time how right you were. I stopped, stared at the TV, and saw three kids on keyboard, guitar, and drums playing this song that was slowly seeping into me through my skin.

As I continued to listen, and the “MmmBops” imprinted onto my soul, something inside me came online—as if I had typed my screen name and password in to the AOL instant messenger login screen, but someone had finally clicked the little running green man icon to “Sign On.”

From that moment on, full teenage girl mode was activated. And, before I knew it, my dad was sitting in the car in the parking lot of the New World Music Theatre after driving me over two hours one-way to the south side of Chicago, and he sat sat in that car waiting three hours while I was at a Hanson concert with my younger brother—because my supposed “best friend” said her parents “wouldn’t let her go,” but I feel like really she just didn’t want to go. And I make a mental note to reevaluate the entire friendship because it seems like she hasn’t become a teenage girl yet, and I really need a girlfriend to be there as my wing-woman when I run into a boy band when I’m out and about, and one of them notices me and decides I am the love of his life and asks me to go on tour with them.

And that definitely won’t happen if I run into said boy band with my younger brother. Definitely not.

Oh, August 23rd, 1997. Insert deep teenage sigh here. There is something definitive that happens when you become a teenage girl. It’s like suddenly breathing doesn’t provide as much oxygen as it used to. Your brain is still physically in your body, but your mind is always somewhere else. Always day- dreaming about your favorite boy band member and imagining all the different ways in which he might tell you he has fallen in love with you after spotting you in a crowd.

And so, thank you, Hanson, for the being the gateway drug I needed to be ready when *NSync and 98 Degrees came on the scene. Thank you, “MmmBop,” for being the catalyst in me becoming the quintessential American, boy-band-loving teenage girl I was always meant to be.