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A former girl group member is recounting her experience touring with Britney Spears — in the early days, when the pop superstar was a little-known singer making stops at malls around America.
On the July 13 episode of Pod Meets World — a Boy Meets World rewatch podcast hosted by Danielle Fishel, Rider Strong and Will Friedle — Sarah Christine Smith shared that prior to becoming a member of the ’90s girl group Nobody’s Angel, she worked as a touring dancer.
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“I toured with Britney. So I did the very first mall tour with her,” Smith said. “It was so crazy because we would go into malls and no one knew who she was, right? So we’d go in, we’d go shopping before our show, we’d go do our show, we’d, you know, do like, she’d sit and do autographs, we’d go walk around, and it was like, you know, it wasn’t the phenomenon that it became.”
But quickly enough, Spears began to take off, she added. “I remember the first time that I heard her song on the radio. Like, I called Jive Records, and I was like, ‘You guys, I just heard it on the radio’… And then it just started blowing up from there. So yeah, I did that for a while with her.”
She continued: “And then I kind of had to make the choice because it was right when Nobody’s Angel was starting. So I kind of had to make a choice. And so I made the choice to go with Nobody’s Angel, and I kind of had to let my touring with Britney go, which was a hard choice for sure because touring with a big artist was one of my dreams as a dancer.”
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But once Nobody’s Angel began to take off, Smith — who also appeared in the “…Baby One More Time” music video — reunited with Spears when her group became the opening act for her tour.
In 1999, the members of the group guest-starred as fictionalized versions of themselves on Boy Meets World, and in 2000, they released their first and only studio album, Nobody’s Angel.
The group also worked on their own television show with Disney, though it ultimately never aired.
After the group fell apart, Smith auditioned as a dancer again, ultimately landing a 2001 Pepsi commercial with Spears.