July 31, 2018
I don't think it will be that tough to figure out the main subject in the blind, but it is a story I have been wanting to write for a few years now. I always tend to want to write it this time of the year. To make it more puzzle friendly, I am including some of the people that were on the sidelines during this period.
When I met her, I knew who she was, but really just as someone who enjoyed her previous record when I heard it, and would have told her if I had run into her. I thought that record was brash and really expected nothing less in real life from someone who made that kind of record. The thing was though, when I first met her she was 180 degrees from that.
I almost never met her. I'm trying to think of some other way I would have met her if not for that weekend, and I don't think we would have crossed paths. I tried to think of every possible way to get out of going to where I did meet her. You know, where all it would have taken is one gust of wind and I would have pulled out. I don't like heat. I hate it in fact. Some of the greatest feelings I have had in life were when I was hot and planted myself in front of an air conditioner. Who remembers those moments? Me, that's who.
Things were different for this particular event back then. Very different. I do remember making a call to this foreign born former A list singer group/solo in my 120 Minutes kind of world (SO) and landed two tickets for a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time friend of the site who I would still do anything for because she wanted to see her at the time favorite band. When I got the tickets, I of course told the former A lister that the long time friend of the site considered SO to be her favorite singer ever.
Anyway, SO was supposed to perform in LA two nights before her show and I had plans to go and hit whatever booze she ordered in her rider. She canceled her show though and we decided to do dinner instead. The thing about SO is that I understand her so much better the more I drink. She says I use it as an excuse to drink more. Probably. My drunken self got ahead of my common sense and I agreed to go see her perform. The only reason is because she was going a day ahead of time, so no traffic and she had a place to stay where I could crash for a couple nights. How was I going to get back home was something I should have thought about, but didn't.
So, I went and I sweated a lot. It was during the hottest part of that day during soundcheck that I first met the subject of our blind. Let us call her TD. Unlike what most of you might think about TD, she was incredibly shy when I first met her. SO introduced her to me. After a brief hello, SO left us alone while she went and did some press or drank tea with honey or something. It was just myself and TD. Felt like 20 minutes but it was about a minute before she said "It's f**king hot isn't it?" Only she said it in an accent that made it come out something like, "f************king hot in it." I laughed. Out loud. Hard. She laughed that I laughed and smiled this huge 10,000 watt smile.
TD wasn't famous back then. People knew her and her biggest song ever was out, but no one was buying it. No one was playing it. She got the gig courtesy of the record label that pushed for her and a management company that combined her with someone else. I promised SO I would stay sober until she finished her show because she said I needed to or she wouldn't let me crash back at her place. The night before, there had been a little too much drinking on my part. I agreed. I saw TD a few times that night after she performed and she popped up at the place where SO was crashing. I told TD if she was ever in LA to give me a call and gave her my number.
I never expected to hear from her again. I was wrong. It was not quite two months later she called me and said she was in town and said she needed a place to crash because her arrangements were not working for her. Those arrangements were a really nice hotel suite. The problem was she was trying to hide from her boyfriend at the time because he found out she hooked up with this permanent A list rapper who ALL of you know and who all of you knew then and who NONE of you would ever suspect of hooking up with TD. Let us call him RE-MIX.
TD says she called a couple other people, but those people all knew the boyfriend. She needed someone no one knew. So, she came over. I gave up my futon and there she slept. The next day she was pretty manic and out of sorts. There was a lot of smoking. A whole lot of lighting the next cigarette with the one before it. She did ask me to go to the event where she was performing. I thought she was asking out of guilt, but when we went to lunch I could tell she meant it. That laugh of hers was crazy. I remember even that day, no one came up to her and asked her for anything. No photos. No autographs. Nothing.
I went to the event and did see this former bubblegum pop singer turned actress try to hide the fact she was hooking up with her then co-star who was relatively unknown at the time and is now probably A/A- list depending on his big of a fan you are of the defunct network hit. She was also seeing a celebrity and some old guy and didn't want anyone to know she was seeing all these guys because she thought it was bad for her image.
I remember seeing this at the time A- list actress who is probably a little lower now, but still crappy at acting doing some lines of blow at an after party.
I never even spoke to TD again that day after dropping her off. Nothing from her at all until three months later when she was back in town and once again asking to crash on my futon because once again she was hiding from people. I gathered she liked having places where no one could find her from labels to management to agents to boyfriends. For two days straight she hung out with my family and watched television until all hours. She loved infomercials. There were a couple concerts thrown in but for the most part it was television and beer and chain smoking.
It was during those two days that we started talking about movies and she said she always wanted to be in a movie. A mysterious character. She could be a singer, but she wanted to be someone who was the key to everything. It had to be a drama. She wanted to to be the piece to bring it all together and wanted to use an American accent. She could do it really well. I jokingly told her we should try and shoot a scene. She said we should. She was serious. A week later we were in a northern city and she sang a song which she never sang before or since which she thought was the perfect movie song of all time. She then did about a half page of dialogue which she nailed in one take. I sent her the DVD of her performance and for months she said she watched it every day. She got into a fight a few months after with her boyfriend and he broke it. She said it was the most she ever cried because she always had that dream. I offered to send her another copy but she didn't want it. That was our last conversation for the final three years of her life.
SO - Bjork
TD - Amy Winehouse
Mandy Moore/Zachary Levi
RE MIX - Jay Z
Tara Reid
