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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.