Everybody has that one celebrity whom they grew up idolizing, most of the time from afar.

For Valerie Hill of Lake Park and her best friend, Amber Jones of Jasper, those celebrities were New Kids on the Block.

The boy band from Boston, Mass., hit stardom in the late 1980s and early 1990s with hits such as “Please Don’t Go Girl” and “Step By Step” before disbanding in 1994. In 2008 on “The Today Show,” the group reunited, announced plans for a new single, a new album and a new tour. The band has been going non-stop since.

As a fellow boy band lover, I met Hill and Jones in Orlando where I sat next to them at the NKOTBSB concert. (NKOTBSB is a combined ‘super group’ that consists of New Kids on the Block and the Backstreet Boys that has been selling out arenas all over North America).

Jones, a native of Jasper and a music teacher in the Echols County School System, met Hill, a Jacksonville native, in 1993 at another concert — one by country music’s Aaron Tippin — and have been best friends since.

“She (Jones) actually introduced me to my husband, which is why I’m living up here,” Hill said.

Hill is a stay-at-home mother, also owns Lakes Chapel and Clubhouse, a wedding venue, in Lake Park with her husband.

Both Hill and Jones have been fans of New Kids on the Block since the beginning of the band’s career.

“I can remember hearing about them then, (back in 1987),” Hill said.

“You should have seen my room,” Jones recalled of her younger years. “You could not even see the paint. I had posters literally on the ceiling to the floor. I had everything New Kids on the Block — bedsheets, bedspreads — it was insane. The sleeping bag, pillow cases, watches, hats, necklaces, you name it, if it was New Kids, I had it. I wore a button to school everyday,” Jones said. “I had a different one every day and I would wake up and say ‘Hmm, which one will I wear today?’”

“I wasn’t that crazy,” Hill laughed. “I only had a few posters on my wall. They would come to Jacksonville

all the time for concerts, but their show would always sell out.”

Jones, on the other hand, was luckier.

“I actually went three times to see them when I was younger. I met them when I was 12, but I was such an inexperienced fan and so immature, that I was just so star-struck that all I did was hold my mouth open. I didn’t say anything, except I just kind of stuttered all over myself. I didn’t ask for a picture, but I did get an autograph from Donnie (Wahlberg) and if it wasn’t for my Mama, I wouldn’t have gotten a hug.”

Step By Step

In the 20 years that have passed since the New Kids on the Block’s heyday, both Hill and Jones have grown up, married, had families, and started their own lives.

“I don’t have a lot of time to watch TV, period, with two little boys and working full-time, but I have kept up with (Wahlberg’s) career since I was a fan and I’ve tried to keep up how they’ve been successful, but following their every move the past 20 years, I haven’t,” Jones said.

She hadn’t given them much thought until late spring 2008 when the group reunited on “The Today Show.”

“When they reunited in 2008, I remember I was sitting at the computer and I pulled up the YouTube video and all of those feelings that I got when I was 12 and 13, they just came back,” Jones said. “My little boy walked over to me and said ‘Mama, what’s wrong with you?’ and I said, ‘Honey, just give me a minute.’ I made him walk away,” she laughed.

Hill’s and Jones’ two days in Orlando would be more than what the two fans ever expected it would be, but it was all by pure coincidence.

“I was looking on StubHub.com for Taylor Swift tickets for my daughter and NKOTBSB popped up and I knew they were in Atlanta the week before,” Hill said. “I saw that they were in Orlando and there were three tickets for sale and so I texted Amber and told her, just joking around with her. She said, ‘I’ll go. I’ll bring you the money tomorrow.’”

After thinking of a way to talk to her husband, Hill finally asked him.

“I told him it was the one concert I wanted to go to when I was younger that I didn’t get to go to,” Hill said.

Soon, they had sixth-row tickets and later was able to upgrade to front-row tickets.

They were soon on their way to living out their teenage dreams.

The Right Stuff

“It was like we had everything just fall into place,” Jones said. “We were always at the right place at the right time and everything just fell into place the whole two days.”

While Jones happened to be online when tickets for the Wahlberg / Jordan Knight VIP after-concert event went up for grabs, they got even luckier when they arrived in Orlando that Thursday afternoon at their hotel.

“When we pulled up to valet park (at the hotel), Danny (Wood of New Kids on the Block) was outside with his daughter, waiting for someone to pick them up. We knew we were at the right place,” Hill said.

After going to dinner at the hotel restaurant that Thursday evening, Hill and Jones waited by the elevator to go back up to their room when Jonathan Knight of the group stepped on the elevator with them.

“If this had been 20 years ago, we would have been screaming. Girls would have been waiting outside,” Hill said. “They would have had cops and security, but it was so neat that they were just able to walk around freely and live a normal life again.”

The next day while walking down Church Street, they ran into Joey McIntyre, who was about to get on his bus after leaving a restaurant.

“He was very nice and very kind and seemed very grateful that I asked him and did not seem irritated at all,” Jones said. “In fact, he made sure that my picture took because I took it with my cell-phone camera. He didn’t make me feel like I was being a nuisance at all.”

While Hill and Jones were able to meet the majority of the members at the hotel, it was Wahlberg, Jones’ favorite member which would be the most difficult to meet. Wahlberg, on his days off on the NKOTBSB tour, has been flying to New York City to film new episodes of his hit CBS show, “Blue Bloods.” With a day off between their show in Louisville, Ky., and their show in Orlando, Wahlberg was spending his off day working.

“I just had a goal, that’s all I wanted was a picture with (Wahlberg),” Jones said. “Whenever I heard they were having that (VIP event), I knew I had a chance.”

Lights, Camera, Action

For the concert, which featured opening act Matthew Morrison who plays Will Schuester on the hit Fox TV show “Glee,” Hill and Jones had front-row seats at the end of the long stage. During the show, they got up close to several members of the Backstreet Boys who passed by in the audience and McIntyre who came over and performed in the crowd nearby, but their favorite part of the show was something totally different — the opening.

All nine members of both groups took the stage for the first time together, singing a smash-up of two of their hits, “Single” (New Kids on the Block) and “The One” (Backstreet Boys), to the melody of Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida.”

“The opening act when they came out (was my favorite part of the show),” Jones said. “That adrenaline and seeing them for the first time after 20 years.”

“Seeing them around the hotel and walking around Church Street, that didn’t really excite me, until I saw them in concert,” Hill said.

“That’s the facade that we were in love with then, the ones on stage and not the ones walking around in street clothes,” Jones said.

After the two-and-a-half-hour show between the two groups, Hill and Jones left for the after-concert VIP event where they knew they would meet Jordan Knight, Hill’s favorite member, and hoped to meet Wahlberg.

But Hill and Jones’ dreams almost didn’t come true. After arriving, they missed their opportunity to get their picture taken with Knight upstairs. But as Jones said, it pays to be nice to people.

After talking to the assistant of the guy who puts on the VIP events, they were let into the exclusive section where Wahlberg and Knight were entertaining the crowd and finally met Knight.

“One thing I told Jordan when I met him was, ‘You have the most beautiful falsetto I’ve ever heard,’ and a falsetto is when a male sings in a high-register voice and he looked at me, kind of surprised, that I was using musical terminology,” Jones said. “He said ‘thank you so much’ and he just grabbed me and hugged me. I told him I was a music teacher and knew what I was talking about and he hugged me again. He seemed so grateful that I had given him that compliment.”

While Hill got to meet Knight, Jones made it her mission to meet Wahlberg who was busy entertaining the crowd along with members of Boyz II Men (who were surprise guests at the NKOTBSB concert) and former ‘N Sync member Joey Fatone.

“After I met Jordan, Donnie was just five feet away and I walked over to him and was like, ‘I’ve liked you since I was 12 years old. Can I get a picture’ and he said ‘wait a minute.’ And we had special permission to stand there and we stood right there by his bodyguard like we thought we weren’t something,” Jones laughed. “After he got done entertaining, he turned around to do the picture. I told the bodyguard, ‘Listen, I’m married with two children and it’s way past my bedtime. When I get this picture, I’m going home and going to bed.’”

After meeting Wahlberg and Knight, the two fans eventually returned to their hotel then South Georgia and North Florida to their families, but they hope this isn’t the last New Kids trip they get to take.

“We want to make the concert the yearly mother get-a-way,” Hill said. “We want to do the (All Access) VIP meet and greet (before the concert), forget about the (VIP after-concert event) because that’s too much stress.”

“It (hadn’t) crossed my mind until we went through the stress of the after-party that we realized too quick that I was too old for that,” Jones said. “I’m a wife and mother of two now and I cannot be hanging with those 20-year-olds.”

Beyond everything, they feel that they had someone looking out for them during the two-day trip to Orlando.

“It may sound silly, but we feel like our heart was in the right place, and we were going to have good innocent fun and our family supported us and that we were there to live out a teenage dream and so we don’t see anything wrong with what we were doing,” Jones said. “We do feel like God was allowing those things to work out for us.”

“If you had told me back in 1987 that in 24 years that I would finally get to go to a concert and meet them all, I would have thought you were crazy,” Hill said. “It was definitely worth the wait.”