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, I REALLY didn’t come here to make friends , I thought.
    The lights of MexiCali Live dimmed, and the band members took their places on the tiny stage. The excitement was palpable as the band played the first few chords of “Rock On” (the David Essex song, not the Gary Glitter creepfest) and Constantine emerged from backstage. The multicolored theater lights caught the perfect, natural highlights of his long, brown mane as I thought, Whoa—nice hair. He was surprisingly thin and tall, dressed in a white V-neck, a vest, and a necklace. For the next ninety minutes, Constantine and his band played covers of every second-rate rock song you’ve ever heard, which makes me think that he probably couldn’t license any songs from Rock of Ages .
    “A Night at the Rock Show” was fun, albeit corny. At one point, Constantine took the microphone chord and wrapped it around his back, then shimmied almost like in those old “Zestfully” clean commercials. Heidi and I looked at each other and began laughing as the surrounding crowd shushed us so they could capture his every movement on their iPhones. 18 Constantine sings well, no doubt, and I appreciate that he’s found a profitable niche as the master of all rock music covers, but I still had a case of the dumb chills. 19 That is, until he pointed at me and we made eye contact.
    Toward the end of the concert, Heidi and I had scooted our way to the front of the “crowd” of a few dozen ladies as Connie was crooning a power ballad. I flipped my hair, sipped my Corona, and stared up at the hairy Greek Romeo. Just then, we locked eyes, and he pointed at me and made an upward motion with his chin, Dylan McKay style, and made me feel like the only girl in the room.
    “Holy shit, he just totally pointed at you!” Heidi squealed while trying to keep her voice quiet.
    “I know—holy shits!” I squeaked out through clenched, smiling teeth. I stared at his perfect mane of fluffy curls as all the irony and joke crush stuff fell away, leaving only a real crush. No joke. In that moment of eye contact, this crush had pulled a Velveteen Rabbit and become real. I was going to meet and hump Constantine Maroulis, but the mission to ruin him was aborted. This wasn’t a joke anymore. This was real. I wasn’t doing this for cocktail banter anymore. With a nod of his chin and a moment of eye contact, I was doing this for real. For life. Forever. We could build a life together based on our mutual love of both performing and our own hair. We could make magic.
    “A Night at the Rock Show” closed with “We Are the Champions,” the song that made a splash when Constantine performed it on American Idol all those years ago. Immediately after the show, a gaggle of women assembled outside the green room door, and Heidi and I agreed that such behavior was pathetic and would probably impede a D-list hump, so we sat down to eat some Mexican food. I needed to chow so that I could sober up before I drove the rental car back to Brooklyn, and we needed to review on the night’s events.
    “Well, he totally pointed at you and checked you out, so what’s the plan now?” Heidi asked as we shoveled guacamole in our faces.
    “I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll play it coy and just tweet something about the show? I mean, I’m not going to stand by the green room door like a tool. He’s probably gone by now anyway,” I responded. Heidi and I talked strategy for about an hour, then headed out to the parking lot. As we exited MexiCali Live, I pulled out a cigarette so I could smoke before we got in the car. My formerly valuable “smoking while driving” skills had gone down the crapper since college.
    At this point, it had been maybe an hour since the show and I was mid–Marlboro Light when who walked out of the venue but my hairy Greek sex god, friggin’ Constantine Maroulis! The main event! The reason we were in goddamn Teaneck, New Jersey, on a school night. The master of puppets of “A Night at the