My First Walk On The Red Carpet!

Last weekend, Jen and I did a booksigning at a gothic book shop called Dark Delicacies. I highly recommend going there if you’re ever in or near Burbank, CA. The shop is wonderful (And my opinion isn’t biased because of the thank you gifts they handed out to the authors. The shop really is fantastic and I’ll be doing a lot of Christmas shopping there.)

Anyhow, one of the gifts was tickets to the premiere of ‘Doom’ with The Rock.

Oh hell yeah, I was wanting to go. I’d never been to a premiere before. Jason balked citing too much work to do, but his best friend Eddie agreed to go with me…even though it rained all day.

Once at Universal City Walk, we had some time to kill. Eddie hadn’t realized what I’d meant by ‘premiere’ and ‘red carpet’ until we walked by the front of the theater and saw all the hullabaloo set up. He turned to me, “Is that where we’re going?” I thought, “duh”, but said, “Yup!” and then we grabbed dinner at a crepe shop.

We still didn’t now exactly how this whole premiere thing worked. I mean, there were fences and stuff around the red carpet and because of all the plastic to keep out the rain, it was hard to figure out where we were supposed to go. But we did have tickets, so we walked up to one of the security guards.

I came dressed for rain. I didn’t want to mess around with an umbrella so I wore my knee-high silver vinyl boots, violet snakeskin vinyl pants, green sweater and metallic blue vinyl jacket…oh, and a metallic brown vinyl hat. I really didn’t care what I looked like. The rain had seriously been coming down all day and the last thing I wanted to do was go see a movie while being wet and freezing. Due to my vinyl outfit–and the rain tapering to a drizzle–I weathered quite nicely.

The security guard looked the two of us up and down and was ready to tell us to get lost. (I don’t blame him one bit!) When the guard asked if we needed to go to will call for tickets, he had that ‘get lost’ edge in his voice still. But then Eddie whipped out our tickets and the guard’s song changed to, “Yes, sir. Right this way,” essentially. It was actually pretty funny. We had orange tickets while just about everyone else had blue tickets. I never did figure out what the difference in colors meant.

Anyhow, that guard pointed us toward another 5 or so guards who succintly stated, “Go to your left,” when we got to the infamous red carpet. To the right were all the photographers and at some point the important people. To the left, there was a crowd of tourists and gawkers held back behind the fences. Eddie suggested he hold up his jacket while shouting, “No pictures!” and running me in. I reminded him that it was already too late. They’d seen us and knew we were nobody…unless someone mistook me for Jennifer Beals–which does happen sometimes–but I doubt Jennifer Beals would go to a movie premiere while wearing as much vinyl as I was. She’s got class. I, however…

Anyway, after our stroll along the soggy red carpet (which, BTW I loved just for the sake of getting to walk on THE red carpet no matter how water-logged it was) we got into the theater lobby where we met about fourteen more guards and were given the cavity search. They pointed us up a set of stairs.

Then another guard yelled at us, telling us to stop and wanting to see our tickets again. (Judging by the looks we kept getting, I think the guards thought we were vagrants or something. We didn’t really fit in with the people who were already in the theater. As more arrived, everything normalized, but still, at that point, we were too odd-looking to be there.)

We got sent to two theaters before getting to sit down. If I’d chosen to dilly-dally, I could’ve waited to see The Rock and the rest of the cast, but there’s a weird feeling on the other side of the red carpet.

Yeah, I’d already seen The Rock when I was on Be Cool, but there’s also a sort of different feeling that I hadn’t expected once I’d walked the red carpet and entered the theater lobby. Like the fans and gawkers were all outside and everyone inside shouldn’t gush or drool or whatever over the cast.

I’d assumed once I’d gotten into the building that I’d hang around and watch the stars arrive, but the whole feeling changed once I got my free popcorn. It was like I was supposed to be blase about being in the midst of stars.

Well, as blase as I could be while wearing that much bizarre vinyl.

The energy in the building was nifty because it was the premiere and we were all seeing the movie before the general public. I never did figure out what the orange vs. blue tickets were about.

The movie wasn’t bad, wasn’t good. I’ll admit that it’s been years since last I’d watched someone play ‘Doom’ the video game upon which the movie is based, so perhaps I was a little removed from the movie, but in general the entire experience was absolutely fantastic. I really had a great time. Unfortunately, I didn’t have tickets to the afterparty, but oh well. Maybe next time.

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