walking the red carpet for "Exes & Ohs"

Saturday was the GLAAD media awards here in Los Angeles, and yours truly was invited to attend as a guest of Logo. It was only my second red-carpet event for "Exes & Ohs" and I just realized today that I didn't post a blog about the first red-carpet event, which was for the Logo/Time Warner launch party. Whoops! Sorry about that...

So, below is my first official "Exes & Ohs" red-carpet blog entry. I hope you enjoy. And, by the way, if you're not familiar with GLAAD, please do visit their site to learn about the incredible work they do.

Okay, so the red-carpet blog entry... Well, first of all, I should state for the record that there's a difference between just going to a red-carpet event - and going to a red-carpet event as "talent."

[Sidenote: The sentence structure fanatics among you might have bristled at my using an adjective as a noun. But in Hollywood, people can do whatever they want - including magically changing adjectives to nouns - and so in this usage, "talent" is actually a noun. Calling someone "talent" (noun) has nothing to do with whether or not the person is actually talented at something... Rather, it's a generic category that can include actors, musicians, reality tv stars, sports heroes, or anyone else you might recognize from the big or small screen.

Jennifer Aniston? Talent. Jake Gyllenhaal? Talent. TR Knight, Ben Affleck, Martina Navratilova, Lance Bass? All talent (and all at Saturday's event, by the way). Former Reality Show Star Extending 15 Minutes of Fame? You got it... Talent. Michelle Paradise? Yep. I'm "talent" too.]

Okay, so back to the red-carpet event... When you go as non-talent, there's usually a VIP pre-party that you may or may not be part of, then there's the event itself (in this case, the GLAAD awards ceremony), then there's a dinner (which is sometimes part of the awards ceremony), and then post-event parties that you also may or may not be part of. You get dressed up, stress about what you're wearing, hope you look nice, make your friends tell you how nice you look, and then at some point you relax and by the end of the night you realize you've had a pretty great time all in all.

When you go to a red-carpet event as "talent," it's a little bit different. As talent, you're taken to the VIP event through a separate entrance so that you can walk the red carpet (which really is red most of the time, in case you're wondering). It sounds quite glamorous, walking the red carpet, and in some ways it is... and in some ways, it's not. On the red carpet, you stand in front of a line of photographers, all of whom are jockeying for the best position, and before you can ask "do I have lipstick on my teeth?" flash bulb after flash bulb is going off at your face, quite literally blinding you. And really all you can do at that point is pray that there's no lipstick on your teeth because after the event, these photos are posted online for all the world to see and use (for a fee). If you're famous - or infamous - the photos might even be included in People or Us Weekly (at which point you'd better hope that you weren't one of the fashion donts of the evening!). :-)

Of course, I'm neither famous nor infamous at the moment, so I got to do the red carpet without having to worry about where my photo might go (in fact, I think you'd be lucky to find it even after an exhaustive search, which means that if I did have lipstick on my teeth, no one will ever know... whew!).

Let's see... what else? Well, after the red carpet stuff, "talent" goes to the ceremony, dinner, etc. with everyone who is not "talent," the only difference being that as talent you may have better seats. Or, at least, you're guaranteed to not be seated in the back of the Kodak Theater behind a post. Then at the end of the evening, you get a lovely gift bag.

The GLAAD awards are nice in that all the attendees - "talent" or not - get gift bags. All the gift bags were the same, which means that everyone (yes, everyone) received, among other things: a DVD, several CDs, a bottle of olive oil, a bottle of diet soda, a 3-day pass to a snazzy gym, a gift certificate for brunch at a snazzy hotel, a large brochure for an expensive car, a small brochure for the same expensive car, two different brands of green tea, a magnet, a pen, several magazines, a Starbucks gift card, a baseball cap, some over-the-counter sleeping pills, and an unusually large bottle of personal lubricant.

No, I'm not joking about any of that.

So, now that I've taken my gift bag home and removed the lipstick streak from my teeth, what have I learned about attending red carpet events as Logo talent? Well, I've learned that it's basically the same experience as attending when I was not a Logo talent... You get dressed up, stress about what you're wearing, hope you look nice, make your friends tell you how nice you look, and then at some point you relax and by the end of the night you realize you've had a pretty great time all in all - and an even better time when you realize that since your show isn't even on the air yet, no one really knows who you are... which means that no one bothered to take pictures of you dancing on the tabletop wearing nothing but your new baseball cap. Whew indeed!