We Flew to Vegas to See My Sister’s Teenage Heartthrob and I’d Do It Again Tomorrow
There is a old photo in one of my scrapbooks. Two little girls on a bunk bed, talking about things teen girls talk about and grinning like they own the whole world. And behind them, a wall of David Cassidy.
That was my wall. My sister had her own room covered in Donny Osmond.
We were maybe twelve and fourteen years old in that photo, growing up in the era of tiger beat magazines and 45 rpm singles and heartthrobs who made you feel things you didn’t quite have words for yet. My guy was David. Hers was Donny. And we carried those loyalties the way you carry the things that shape you when you’re young, quietly, for decades, tucked into the back of your heart.
So when Donny Osmond announced he was doing a residency in Las Vegas, my sister and I called each other and agreed: it’s time.
This is a story about one of the best sister trip ideas we ever had. And if you have a sister and a shared history and a teenage heartthrob still living out there somewhere, I am here to tell you to go buy the tickets right now.
The Wall That Started It All
Here is what I want you to understand about growing up loving a teen idol in the 1970s. It wasn’t casual. It wasn’t a playlist you could scroll past. You saved up your allowance for the magazine. You cut out every photo carefully so you didn’t tear the edges. You arranged them on the wall with intention. Your bedroom wall was a statement about who you were and what you loved, and you looked at it every single morning before school. The music was only on albums or singles. No Spotify, no playlists, just an occasional listen on a local radio station. The best we could do was have the tape recorder ready if the song came on, press record! A mix tape was the ultimate in listening pleasure.
My sister’s love of Donny wasn’t just a crush. He was her whole aesthetic for years. The smile, the slightly too-long hair, the way he sang like he meant every word of every song. She knew all his music. She watched every television appearance. She was twelve years old and completely devoted and there is nothing more pure than that kind of love.
And then you grow up. Life happens. You get jobs and marriages and mortgages and the posters come down. But the feeling doesn’t go anywhere. It just waits.
When Donny settled into a Las Vegas residency and started performing regularly, my sister mentioned it once, kind of casually, the way you mention something you want but aren’t sure you’re allowed to want. And I said, “Okay, I think we should actually go.”
When the Fantasy Becomes a Real Plan
That is the thing about sister trip ideas. Most of them live in the “someday” pile for years. You say you should do it, and then life gets in the way, and someday keeps moving. But every once in a while, someone just buys the tickets and suddenly it’s real.
My sister bought the tickets. And just like that, we had a trip.
We planned a full girls weekend in Vegas, which meant we needed a third. So we called our little sister, who at the time was actively chasing her own teen idol around the country. She had discovered Harry Styles sometime in her 50s, which tells you everything you need to know about our family, and she was in Los Angeles when we made our plans because Harry was performing there. When we told her about the Vegas trip she said she’d fly in between shows.
So that was us. Three sisters flying in from three different directions to spend a weekend in Las Vegas watching a man named Donny Osmond perform songs that had meant everything to one of us fifty years ago. Completely logical. Highly recommend.
Three Sisters, One City, and a Lot of Purple
Okay so here is where the trip started becoming the trip.
Purple is Donny’s signature color. Has been forever. So I decided we needed to lean into that. I got us each a purple thermal water bottle and wrote our initials on them in Sharpie (so classy!) so we’d know whose was whose while we were out walking around Vegas. The thermal part mattered more than you might think because it is blazing hot in Las Vegas and if your water bottle sweats all over everything in your bag, you’re going to have a miserable afternoon. So practical AND purple. That’s called winning.
And then for my sister, the Donny fan, the reason we were all there in the first place, I got her a pair of purple gem earrings to wear to the show. Just something special for her night. She put them right on when I gave them to her and she was pleased and I could see it in her face that the whole trip was already starting to feel like something.
We planned our outfits, which is a completely underrated part of any good sisters weekend, and we figured out our route. Las Vegas has a monorail, which we learned how to use and absolutely felt like tiny geniuses about, and we knew right where to jump off to get to the venue. We took our time walking over, just the three of us, in our purple with our water bottles, talking the way you only talk with people who have known you your whole life.
And then we found the concert area, and we walked into the lobby, and that’s when things got real.
The memorabilia display was incredible. Costumes from throughout his entire career, jumpsuits and stage outfits, each one representing a different decade of a life spent performing. And right there in the middle of it was the peacock costume from The Masked Singer. If you watched that show, you know. If you didn’t, just trust me that it is an extraordinary thing to walk up to in person.
My sister stood there and looked at all of it and you could see her putting it together, this whole career, this whole life, all the years between the poster on her bedroom wall and this lobby in Las Vegas.
We found our seats. We were in the third row from the stage.
The third row.
I want you to understand what that means. Close enough to see his face. Close enough that when the lights went down and the music started, it felt personal.
The Night She Finally Got to See Him
He came out and the room went electric.
Now I want to be clear: I was not a Donny Osmond superfan. My heart belonged to David Cassidy. But I am telling you that show was one of the most entertaining things I have ever seen in my life. He is a performer. He has been doing this his whole life and it shows in every single moment on that stage. Funny, warm, completely at ease, and he still sounds exactly like himself.
But what I kept watching was my sister’s face.
She sang every word to every song. Not humming along, not remembering the chorus. Every single word, start to finish, for the entire show. She was right there in the moment in a way that I don’t have words for except to say she looked young again. Not young like she was pretending, but young like something that had been tucked away for fifty years had just been handed back to her.
The lady sitting to my left on the aisle leaned over early in the show and said if Donny came down into the audience, she’d take pictures of us. I told her we’d do the same for her.
And then it happened.
At some point in the show, Donny was taking song requests from the audience, and the lady next to me called one out, and he came down off the stage. He came down the aisle. He took her hand. And he danced with her right there, three feet from my sister, close enough that I could have reached out and tapped him on the shoulder.
My sister did not move. We filmed everything. She watched her teenage heartthrob dancing in the aisle literally three feet away from her and she was absolutely beside herself, which she expressed by the look on her face as she was sitting there watching them.
We sent the lady every photo and video we had taken of her moment and she was speechless and thrilled. And my sister was on cloud nine. She told me afterward she was actually relieved he hadn’t pulled her up, that she’d have been too overwhelmed to function, but being that close and seeing it all happen right in front of her? That was everything.
We dropped all the photos and videos into a shared Dropbox folder for my sister to have at home on her computer. She wanted every single one of them.
She bought a Christmas ornament with his photo on it from the venue that night so she could remember the trip. And later, our little sister gave her a Donny tote bag, because when you have a sister who has loved the same person since she was twelve years old, you mark the occasion.
I have a little crystal paperweight on my desk now with a photo of the three of us from that Vegas trip inside it. It sits right there where I can see it and every time I look at it I think about purple water bottles and the Vegas monorail and a woman in her 60s singing every word to every song like she was twelve years old again and nothing had changed.
And Then Tampa Happened
Okay so that was 2022.
In 2024, Donny was performing in Tampa, which is where my sister lives. So of course we went. Just the two of us this time, which had a different feeling, quieter and more personal, like something just for her.
We got dressed up, which still matters, it always matters, and we found our seats. We were farther back this time, middle section, not the third row magic of Vegas. And honestly that was fine. We knew what to expect. We were there for the music and the memories and each other.
And then guess what happened.
Somewhere in the middle of the show, Donny jumped off the stage and came out into the crowd. And he headed toward our section. And he came right up to the row directly in front of us and stood there and sang for a few seconds, close enough that we got it all on video, close enough that my sister looked at me with an expression that said are you seeing this right now.
Donny Osmond has now ended up in my sister’s immediate vicinity twice in two years and I am starting to think it is not a coincidence.
Why I’d Do It Again Tomorrow
Here is the thing about sister trip ideas that nobody tells you when you are busy being practical about time and money and whether it makes sense on paper.
It always makes sense.
Not because everything goes perfectly or because the seats are always third row or because your teenage heartthrob always happens to dance three feet away from you in the aisle. But because the thing you are actually buying when you plan a trip like this is not a concert ticket. You are buying an afternoon walking Vegas with your initials in Sharpie on matching purple water bottles. You are buying the look on your sister’s face in the lobby when she sees the peacock costume.
You are buying the two of you at sixty-something singing every word to songs you learned fifty years ago in bedrooms covered in posters, and feeling, just for a few hours, like the girls you still are inside.
My little sister, the world traveler, the one who flies solo to Los Angeles and other locations wherever Harry Styles happens to be performing next, gave the whole Vegas trip her stamp of approval afterward. She said she would go again. And that is high praise from a woman who has seen things and done things and has extremely high standards for how she spends her time.
So if you have been thinking about planning a sister trip and you keep waiting for the right moment, I am telling you the right moment is whenever someone buys the tickets. Pick the thing. Make it purple if you can. Ride the monorail. Get the earrings.
And go be twelve years old again together for one night. I promise you will not regret a single minute of it.
Want to read more about my experiences? Go check out No Longer Feeling Invisible After 50: Showing Up Anyway.
