The little girls who made the New Kids on the Block a boy band sensation in the late 1980s and early 1990s are all grown up, and now they've got disposable income.

So what better way to show their love for Jordan, Jonathan, Joey, Donnie and Danny than spending three days with them on a Caribbean cruise?

About 2,100 women, most in their 20s and 30s, paid more than $1,000 each for a sold-out, three-day Carnival Cruise Lines trip that left Miami for the Bahamas yesterday. It kicks off the band's summer concert tour.

ESCAPE FROM 'HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL'

Vanessa Hudgens has left "High School Musical" to make a movie about music — at a high school.

But "Bandslam," due out in August, is being released by the new studio behind "Twilight." Now 20, the actress-singer says she's ready for a departure from her shy, geeky Gabriella Montez role — and from Disney. She has a lead in "Watchmen" director Zack Snyder's next film, "Sucker Punch," about girls trying, at least inside their heads, to break out of a mental institution.

RAPPER T.I. HEADED TO ARKANSAS PRISON

Rapper T.I. must report to Forrest City's low-security federal prison in Arkansas by noon May 26 to serve out his sentence of a year and one day, after pleading guilty in March to federal weapons charges in Atlanta.

The self-proclaimed King of the South, 28, will be credited for 305 days of home detention already served, so his prison stay likely will be only two months.

The rapper tried to buy unregistered machine guns and silencers from undercover federal agents in 2007 after his best friend was gunned down after a Cincinnati party in 2006. He says the attack was meant for him.

'THRILLER' DANCE RECORD SET BY STUDENTS

In what the organizer jokingly calls a case of his "Michael Jackson obsession gone wrong," a group of 242 College of William & Mary students has won the world record for most people to dance to "Thriller" simultaneously in one place. Kevin Dua, 21, who organized the April 19 dance routine, was notified yesterday by Guinness World Records of the record. The previous record was 147 people, last summer at a British school.