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Most people wouldn’t want to spend their birthday waiting in a line, but when Lisa Saari turned 50 last Thursday she spent hers parked in a lawnchair on a sidewalk on Chicago’s Northwest Side. Saari drove up from Joliet that morning in order to gift her teen daughters with the chance to meet Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz. On July 6 the supersized pop-punk group announced it’d host a two-day pop-up shop in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood before its co-headlining tour with Wiz Khalifa pulled into town: The first 50 people in line each day would receive wristbands to meet Wentz. "I planned on sleeping on the sidewalk and everything," Lisa said. "I made a big adventure to kick off turning 50."
Lisa showed up 24 hours before the pop-up would open for the shop’s first day last Friday at 10 a.m., more than enough time to secure the first spot in line—and the second and third for her daughters too. They gathered sleeping bags, pillows, blankets, and chairs and planted themselves in front of Air Gordons, a shoe and streetwear boutique that served as the temporary home of Fall Out Boy’s IRL merch store. Air Gordons sits on Fullerton Avenue, just one block east of the Fireside Bowl, the onetime hub of Chicago’s all-ages punk scene and one of the venues where Fall Out Boy got its start.
This stretch of Fullerton isn’t particularly kind, but Lisa and her daughters made the stretch of sidewalk they temporarily resided on a little friendlier. When I got to Air Gordons a little less than an hour before its door opened, Saari was enthusiastically talking about the people she met while camping out—the people who came from an adjacent neighborhood, the family that drove in from Indiana, all of whom she split a pizza with the night before. "They gave me the best birthday present ever," Saari said. "A muffin on top of a doughnut, and they stuck candles in it and they all sang to me."
Among the people Saari befriended was high school student Rebecca Karpen-King, who fell for Fall Out Boy after watching a "Naruto" animated music video featuring the group’s 2007 hit "Thanks Fr Th Mmrs". "That was when I was about 9, and now I’m 17, still a huge supporter," Rebecca said. The pop-up purportedly sold Fall Out Boy gear that wasn’t available anywhere else, which whet Rebecca’s appetite. "Once I know something [is] ‘limited time only,’ I’m like, ‘I need to get this cause it’s gonna sell out and I’ll never see it again,’" she said. "You know, Pete Wentz, I consider him a collectible."
Rebecca showed up at 9 p.m. on Thursday, convincing her mom she had friends who were already queued up and waiting for her. "My mom pulls up and I’m looking and I notice these people who look like they could be my friends—you know, they’re mostly women," Rebecca said. "So I’m like, ‘Hey, hey, can you guys pretend to be my friends to my mom over there?’ And they just bursted out laughing and said, ‘Sure, I’ll go meet her, I’ll go introduce myself.’ And that was Lisa."
Lisa helped watch over the crowd as it turned into a crowd—by her count about 60 people had gathered on the sidewalk by 2 a.m. on Friday. "I kind of took it upon myself that there was no line jumping," Lisa said. (Lisa also scoped out the restroom options, locating one a couple blocks west at a 24-hour BP gas station.) The line accumulated more than 150 people—mostly teenaged women, a few sporting bright red or aqua-green hair—by the time Eleanor Ceisel and her friend Zack Mccraw arrived from the Chicago suburbs at 7 a.m.
Eleanor and Zack, both 16, met their freshman year in French class, shortly after a friend of Eleanor’s introduced her to the band. "They had just come out with Save Rock and Roll, their album, so I heard ‘Young Volcanoes’ and I bought the whole album," Eleanor said. "Then a month later I bought every song on iTunes." Eleanor hooked Zack onto Fall Out Boy—he was sporting a black T-shirt for the band—but she’s more of the fan. "I’ve dragged him to a concert or two," Eleanor said. The pair hopped on a train to the city at 5:30 a.m. in the hopes of meeting Pete Wentz. "He’s my favorite," Eleanor said.
Eleanor and Zack were a little too far back in line to get the wristbands to meet Wentz, but they had a better shot at it than Haley Farkas and Sean Pedraza. Haley and Sean took a spot at the tail end of the line, nearly an entire block east, and arriving shortly before the shop’s door opened and security began letting in five to seven people at a time. But Haley, 22, and Sean, 20, didn’t have their hopes set on talking to Wentz—they came for the novelty of the pop-up, or, as Sean put it, the shop gave them "something to do today."
Haley moved to Chicago from the Detroit area a couple weeks ago—she’s starting a linguistics PhD program at Northwestern in the fall—and Sean is visiting from Lansing, taking a break after spending two weeks on army reserve duty in Virginia. They’ve both been Fall Out Boy fans since they were teenagers, and Haley’s seen the band 11 times. She says she talked about Fall Out Boy so often that any of her friends who aren’t fans "get annoyed with me pretty fast."
Neither Haley nor Sean looks the part of a Fall Out Boy fan, though Sean says he used to dress to the nines—he’d wear skinny jeans and dark clothes, and he used to keep his black hair at shoulder length before joining the army. "You kinda grow out of the style of dress, more or less," Sean said. But he remains a fan of the band, and earlier this year he saw his first Fall Out Boy show, a record release show for January’s American Beauty/American Psycho at the relatively intimate Lincoln Park venue Lincoln Hall. As Sean said, "You never really grow out of the music you like."