Hey, you New Kids on the Block fanatic: That giant Jordan Knight pin you’ve kept for 20 years has the right stuff - on eBay.
Yeah, the NKOTB reunion tour is hot, but those vintage T-shirts, buttons and painter’s hats featuring the fivesome? Totally on fire thanks to 30-somethings so drunk on Boston-boy-band nostalgia they’re coughing up $31 for a bunch of old Teen Beats with Joey McIntyre’s mug on the cover.
“I made $1,200 so far,” said 35-year-old Jen Stanley, who had the prescience to rummage through her parents’ attic when NKTOB announced their reunion on the “Today” show April 4. The stay-at- home mother of three auctioned off everything from T-shirts to Tiger Beat on eBay for more than a grand - and she’s not even half done.
“You know, I did it to get some extra cash in the house,” said Stanley, who as a teenager used to drive from her childhood home in Billerica to the Wahlbergs house in Dorchester to get a glimpse of Donnie.
“Right now it’s magazines that sell the best,” she said. “I got $128 for a set of 20.”
New Kids concert tickets were being auctioned for hundreds of dollars on eBay this week, but smaller, stranger items were drawing higher-than-expected bids yesterday: $36 for a set of 5 New Kids dolls, $17.50 for a 6-inch-diameter pin of Donnie Wahlberg circa 1990, $26 for a set of three VHS tapes of the New Kids, $56 for a block of 10 magazines and $6.50 for a fanny pack featuring all five Kids’ faces.
Steve Higgins, owner of The Outer Limits, a collectibles store in Waltham, doesn’t get it.
“There’s not a lot of interest here,” he said, adding that he has a few NKOTB dolls and games that are “more of a conversation piece, not a serious collectible. But I think they will be eventually.”
Stacy Wilbur, 28, who scored 11th row tickets to the NKOTB concert at TD Banknorth Garden Sept. 26, said she’d have to really dig to find her New Kids collection. And even if she did, she’d never sell it.
“I’m a pack rat,” she said.
Stanley admits that selling off her coveted collection of all things Joey, Jordan, Jonathan, Donnie and Danny tugs at her inner teeny-bopper heart.
“God, selling off my prized Jordan T-shirt just about broke my heart,” she said.
And she can’t even use the money to buy tickets to the concert.
“I just spent $83 to fill up my gas tank,” she said. “The money is coming in handy in other ways.”
