EDITORIAL DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

I CAN HONESTLY SAY Ricky Martin and I go way back. Not as friends, mind you (we’ve only met a couple of times), but we were born a couple of years apart and he hit the music scene when I was a teen (and he was 12).

All of the tween girls I, , and magazines just about the time I switched over to reading (ditching the teen crush tabloids for essays about sexual self-empowerment). But just a few years prior, I had a poster of Menudo on my wall—that was the Puerto Rican boy band that made Ricky try out three times before they finally accepted him in 1984. The rest, really, is history. Five years later, he left, went solo, and a 1998 World Cup performance broadcast to two people turned him into a global star.