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| Unofficial Celebrity Report: MTV VMA's, Part Three | | Date Created: May 23, 2005, 03:41 PM |
 If you're just joining us (or if you've forgotten our plot since I've taken so long since the previous installment), you can begin with the UCR Part One, then proceed cautiously to UCR, Part Two. Enjoy, and keep your hands inside the car at all times.
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With our adrenaline dying down - Junior's from being nervous about going on-stage, mine from being nervous for him and almost drunk from celeb-sighting - we remembered we hadn't eaten since mid-day. While backstage, we were thanking the damn fine folks at Mars - who had stocked the place with M&Ms, Starbursts and all of their finest confectionary. We grabbed what we could and ventured to the media area.
Lined up like some sort of faux Mohave mirage behind the opera house, tent after tent welcomed Dale Jr. for appearances on MTV, MTV2, MTV.com, VH1, E!, CBS This Morning, and The Today Show. It was like NASCAR media day - other than a large percentage of the interviewers were hot babes rather than... well, you'll have to visit a NASCAR media center some day.
The print media were amassed in the final, largest tent, and offered some surprisingly knowledgable questions. Dale Jr's most quoted line, responding to "what are you listening to these days?," was "I like it all. Right now I'm listening to the 'O Brother, Where Art Thou' soundtrack. Good is good."
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 Released back to our seats, we scurried back to see how Mandy Moore was doing. As soon as we sat down, I proceeded to pull candy from the pockets of my cheesy red leather jacket (the jacket seemed a good idea... at the time), which was met with a barely perceptible squeal of glee from Ms. Moore.
"Oh, do you have any orange ones?" she inquired, pointing to the fresh pack of Starburst chews I was holding.
If there were a Guiness Book of Records entry for the speediest opening of a packet of square lil' fruit chews, you'd see my picture there - grinnin' like a madman in a tragic Italian Ferrari-red jacket. Then, it dawned on me that I'm a goofy old man, feeding candy to a super hot teenager. Damn. But, to her delight and mine, there were three orange ones, so I managed to make a new friend, however briefly.
After a handful of processed sugar, the thing you need next is... a beer. So, at the next break, we leaped from our seats and headed to find some fine Anheuser-Busch products. The bar in the lower lobby had - GASP! - only mixed drinks for the tuxedoed-execs and their dates, so we headed up the massive stairway, steering closely around a denim-wearing Ryan Adams, who had just released his "Gold" CD, and looked more out of place than we did. |
 It wasn't Bud, but the Michelob products available upstairs were just fine with us. (It is an Anheuser-Busch product, ya know.) While we were hangin' at the bar, we missed the on-stage excitement of N'Sync with a surprise appearance by Michael Jackson. That was no big loss, but sadly, we also missed Triumph the Insult Comic Dog busting on Carson Daly and making jokes about J. Lo's ass. ("J-Lo... let me sniff your butt. She doesn't understand, for a dog, that's like Mount Everest...")
But, we did manage to return in time to see Missy Elliott perform "Get Ur Freak On" with guests like Ludacris and Nelly Furtado, and then watched Jay-Z debut "I.Z.Z.O." (H-to-the-IZZO, V-to-the-IZZA...Fashizzle mynizzle dribble down to Dale E-to-the-J-R...now getcha damn hands up) and U2 salute the Ramones.
It was a Thursday night, and with practice scheduled to begin the next afternoon at Richmond (where he would later qualify 8th and finish 3rd), Junior's anxiousness to leave reached a tipping point. Wandering through a side exit, we merely had to nod to a waiting production assistant and a black limo appeared instantaneously to whisk us back to Teeterboro, New Jersey to hop the plane to Richmond. Damn, this lifestyle can spoil ya. |
 Once in the car, Junior finally exhaled and began to relax. Only after a phone call back to North Carolina to the Dirty Mo Posse, was Junior convinced how cool the whole experience had been. (Of course, had we known the conclusion of the show would be Brittney Spears with a large albino snake wrapped around her, we STILL would have left early. Or, perhaps stayed and cheered for the snake, I dunno.)
Five days later, only blocks from where we had basked in the proximity of U2 and Mandy Moore, the attack upon the twin towers of the World Trade Center took place. Among the most minor of the results of that attack included a decision by MTV to not replay the awards ceremony endlessly in the weeks that followed (as they usually do). Also, despite offers to buy them, Junior and I both had to return our Italian leather jackets. Seems the clothing was imported as a "sample," and U.S. customs insisted upon their return. Seriously.
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