Donny Osmond turned 60 years old last week. It was not a trending story, it was just something that I knew, because for some reason almost 45 years later, the date of his birthday – December 9 – sticks in my head.

I also remember his favorite color (according to Tiger Beat Magazine, the teenage girls’ bible of the 70s), purple, which meant that when my saintly sister brought me and two of my friends to Madison Square Garden in New York to see the Osmond Brothers in concert in 1973, I was all decked out in purple and they were in their respective Osmond’s favorite colors. I’m sure we looked like we were characters in a parade or a bad musical.

Back then you couldn’t simply click on a link, choose your price range and reserve your seats. My sister was a mere 22, married barely a year, and did not have a credit card. We ordered our tickets the old-fashioned way.

She mailed a check and a note to Madison Square Garden’s ticket office, requesting the best seats available for the upcoming concert. We waited for maybe two weeks before the tickets arrived in the mail, and were ecstatic to discover our seats were in the first row of Section 101. That sounded to us like we’d be able to see the sweat dripping off our future husbands’ faces.

As it turned out, Section 101 was indeed prime seating – if you were watching a sports event. For a concert it meant that we were in the first row behind the floor section. Binoculars would have been a wise investment.

We had to take the word of hundreds of screaming girls clambering over each other in front of us that the ants on stage really were the melodic males we had been drooling over for months.

My sister would hear nothing about letting us wheedle our way past security for to a better view that day, but when I did a recent Google search for pictures of the actual concert, I felt a sense of camaraderie with the sweaty, wailing girls by the stage, reaching for any Osmond’s pants leg they could possibly reach.

When I was a teenager, I wasn’t distracted by media’s constant thrust of stories about the object of my affection. I had to wait patiently each month for the latest issue of Tiger Beat Magazine to discover if the poster of the month was wall-hanging worthy.

It was exciting to wait for each story about my favorite stars. It’s hard to be excited about anything that shows up on the news or social media today because it never ends.

We survived the Back Street Boys fever and One Direction dedication in our house. Our girls saw concerts, bought music, and kept tabs on their heartthrob’s every move for a time, just like I did. I wonder if some day they will read an article about a former object of their affection and realize he is a grandparent.

Not that it makes me feel old… just old enough to know not to wear purple from head to toe.