Today's Blind Items - The Bluff - Part One

One of the most important things ever learned while interning at a radio station was how to bluff my way to free tickets and backstage passes to concerts. When you are a college student and don’t have unlimited funds, it is a night of fun and complimentary booze and food courtesy of the singer’s rider.  The down side though is inviting a couple of people to go with you and having the person who was supposed to put your name on the list not do so and then you look like an a-hole. Hey, it happened more than once.  One of my favorite tricks was to call up the PR person or manager and tell the person I was a reporter or writer for a made up satellite radio network. There are tons of conglomerates and it is pretty rare to have anyone check up on you because they all want free publicity for their client.

Well, one of my crushes from a few years earlier was in town and although I already had tickets, I wanted to meet her so needed a plan to get backstage passes. The reporter thing would be good except that I really didn’t want to interview her. Most of the time you didn’t actually have to. You were just a name on a list and once inside you would just melt in with all of the other people.  Sometimes though the rep was waiting for you or left word to let them know when you showed up and you would have to interview them. I could do it if I had to, it was just never my first choice. My crush had been an A+ lister for a year or two before her pop music career went crashing into an abyss from which it has never recovered. She does still sing. Acts some. If you are of a certain age or have a love for her style of pop she has A+ list name recognition.  Anyway, I made some calls and a few days later I was put on the list. I was pretty excited to meet her. Excited, but not in a hey I saw The Smiths play live kind of excitement.  Yes, I name dropped The Smiths and yes that is me involved in a huge brawl in a Morrissey Live video you can buy anywhere. That is a story for another day though.

The night before the show to see my crush I got a call from one of my best friends ever who used to get name dropped on the site back in the early days but has since made it very clear she doesn’t want to be name dropped any longer and will probably text me then e-mail me and then call me repeatedly after she reads this not realizing of course that it is a blind and that I am not actually name dropping her or mentioning she was also briefly A+ list in a one hit wonder kind of way, but has a unique look that she still adheres to and also does a little bit of everything to stay in the public eye. All of you would know her. I think she hates that back in the day we used to double date and I frequently remind her of some of her poorer dating choices.

Where was I? Oh yeah. So she calls and says she is going to be in town and wants to hang out and I tell her about the show the next night and she invites herself because of course she knows the crush and they have not seen each other in ages and blah blah blah. This is not going to work out well for me at all. I don’t have a choice though. I can either tell her yes or she will make her own calls and be there anyway.