Won't the real Britney Spears fans please stand up?

Last Saturday night, thanks in part to the Trustees Alcohol Initiative, I had a transcendent experience staring at a seventeen-year-old's perfect navel. Of course, it helped that I had a couple of drinks first, but that's really beside the point. For there, writhing inches before me like Salome before Herod, was the most blessed virgin of the twenty-first century. Our Lady of the Exposed Midriff, divine Lolita to a nation of worshipful Humberts. Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Britney.

Okay, so it wasn't really Britney Spears. And even if it were, I'm not really much of a fan, having given up on erotic fixations for semi-clad pop stars over a decade ago after a brief fling with Paula Abdul. Maybe it was the hot, summery night — maybe it was just the alcohol taking the initiative — but for one brief, shining moment during the middle of "Baby One More Time," young impersonator Anna Czyszczon became Britney, and I became Britney's biggest fan. I let out a scream — a scream of the sort I'd seen on television hundreds of times, often over the course of a single viewing of "A Hard Day's Night," but never thought I would find emerging from deep within the cockles of my own cynical larynx. But there it was, and in its own weirdly post-ironic way, it was sort of sincere.

I didn't expect it to be this way. I suppose it all began several months ago when I was looking for new and innovative ways to procrastinate digitally. I discovered a number of websites consisting of nothing more than links to other sites, all of which were advertised as wildly humorous without intending to be so. Sites of nothing but personal ads by guys who like to dress up like Peter Pan — that sort of thing. The perfect pastime for a child of the nineties so jaded and media-savvy that those actually intending to be amusing inevitably leave my funny bone thoroughly untickled. And among my personal favorites from these collections of cyberkitsch was backstreettribute.com, a multimedia spectacle put on by five guys who get paid to sort of resemble the Backstreet Boys, who themselves get paid (albeit paid much more) to sort of resemble an actual band. So when I heard that another group of Backstreet wannabes would be performing on campus, accompanied by a Britney Spears wannabe and, as it turned out, a surprise opening act in the form of a Jennifer Lopez wannabe, I thought the concert would be a real hoot.

I actually used that specific turn of phrase. "C'mon, people," I said to some friends. "Let's go see the Britney and Backstreet impersonators. It'll be a real hoot." Of course, I would never use such a grandmotherly phrase in a genuinely grandmotherly way. (I may be a grad student, kids, but I'm not that over the hill.) Instead, I was sarcastically inviting my irony-loving friends to join me in watching a cheesy simulacrum of a cheesy simulacrum of rock. Such is the post-modern condition.

Later that evening, after our faux J. Lo got the crowd worked up into a suitably self-mocking frenzy, the Not-Britney took the stage like that Magritte painting of a pipe with the words "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" written below it. Ms. Czyszczon — no name could be more ironic for America's white-bread sweetheart — was playing her role to the hilt and so was the audience. Some rushed the stage or reached out to the starlet. Others waved their hands in the air, almost as if they just didn't care. Even the youngest of freshmen was far too old, far too world-weary to be a real Britney fan, but soon we forgot we were acting, and, for a while, we were twelve-year olds enthralled with our real-life Barbie doll.

Gradually, the spell was broken. One sleazy Princetonian, and then another, handed Not-Britney his business card, something far too unwholesome for the real thing. Next, even more tragically, five fellows who couldn't get a record contract even if they were Puff Daddy's white nephews took Not-Britney's place. Immediately, I noticed that there was an inverse relationship between the degree to which these guys resembled their Backstreet analogues and the degree to which they could actually sing. And when I noticed that I had noticed, my twenty-something self-consciousness returned in full-force.

Some have argued that what our generation requires in order to escape our debilitating irony is a return to the leftist sincerity of our hippy parents or even the nobly self-sacrificing conformism of the so-called "Greatest Generation." Such a return, for better or worse, will remain eternally impossible. But for a short time on Saturday night, in the glint of a Britney impersonator's rhinestone-studded tube top, I achieved something resembling Gen-Y transcendence. Michael Frazer is a politics graduate student from Riverdale, N.Y. He can be reached at mfrazer@princeton.edu.