What's this now...some long-forgotten boy band?
Take a good look. These are not unattractive young guys. Dare we say, they were even handsome? Certainly tempting to many a female eye.
Just at a glance, we see they run the gamut from coolly confident to poetic dreaminess, from studious intensity to rugged vitality. Again, perfect boy band material.
I post this with a sense of irony, for all five of these young guys grew up to be tremendously successful, widely respected, and even beloved by many. But in those later incarnations, I don't know that very many would consider them as possessing sex appeal.
Those later men, we tend to think of them in such terms as stoic, staid, stodgy. And old. They're your dad...or granddad. You can't imagine any of them having actually been young, much less foot loose and fancy free.
Well, this guy you could...
But then he transcends every bar of measurement in this category. He's the Timberlake to the rest of those guys' NSYNC.
One of the unintended consequences of well-known history is that it tends to lock everyone involved in amber. Ask someone to think about George Washington, and they'll doubtless imagine him in his later years, all powdered wig and false teeth...even if you bring up the cherry tree episode from his boyhood. In our mind's eye, Lincoln always looks worn and weathered, with that beard, even though he only wore it for the last four years or so of his life. Reagan is forever elderly (albeit with curiously dark hair)...even though there are dozens of movies showing him young and rugged and very Hollywood handsome.
(If you haven't guessed those are Presidents yet, by the way, I don't know what to tell you. Crack a history book, will ya?)
The problem with that is, when we lock someone into a very specific period of time, we kind of forget they're real flesh and blood people...they become, in a sense, fictional figures, like characters on a TV series. But it's important to remember that they are people, and that they've led full lives long before they ever went to the White House. It's important to recall that they're human.
But seriously, those guys totally should have formed a boy band, right? They'd be called PREXY...the Presidents of Sexy!
