OMG! Bieber fever hits Long Beach Middle School!

“If I had to choose one thing that I wanted in my life,” said teary-eyed eighth grader Jackie Gropper, “that would be it.”

Gropper just had front row seats to an exclusive acoustic concert put on by 16-year-old teen heartthrob Justin Bieber at Long Beach Middle School on April 9. I couldn’t help but smile as she and her friends giggled and squealed as they relived the most amazing moment of their lives. I smiled because I got it. I was there once.

When Bieber was still in diapers, I was plastering my walls with photos of the Backstreet Boys, the mega-boyband of the late 1990s. They were my generation’s Beatles, albeit far less talented. I cried at a meet-and-greet during the summer of 1997 and screamed so loud at all five concerts I attended that my throat was sore for days.

Last week, after passing through three security checkpoints manned by private security guards and Nassau County police officers on foot and horseback, I could feel the buzz throughout the school. Teachers -- possibly reliving their own teenage celebrity infatuations -- were just as excited as the students I could hear screaming in the auditorium.

Bieber had yet to take the stage, but NOW FM DJs were doing a great job amping up the already hyper crowd of middle schoolers.

After nearly an hour of tapping our fingers in a make-shift press room behind the stage, Bieber emerged from his dressing room donning a Free Scooter T-shirt in reference to the arrest of his manager Scott Braun for reckless endangerment after an incident at the Roosevelt Field Mall, where Bieber was supposed to make appearance, in November that ended in a near riot.

“How does Long Beach compare to other places in the world that you have been,” I asked a soft-spoken and polite Bieber before he headed on stage to serenade his screaming fans.

“It’s pretty much the same,” he simply replied. I inched in a bit closer because the screams were so loud I could barely hear him. “I’m getting a lot of good fans and amazing experiences everywhere I go, so it’s been amazing.”