More I Remembered About the Britney Spears Femme Fatale Release Party

Britney Impersonator

So when I finished my last post about the release party for Britney Spears' Femme Fatale album I was beat and didn't finish all about it. And I strategically left out some super hilarious shit that was super mean and catty of me and my friends to point out about the goings on of people involved in putting goon the event or performing in it and I'm feeling like it would be mean of me to write about that stuff on the internet where everybody can read it. So I'm leaving out things that I feel like would create some drama.

In my last post I was talking about how I posed on the "red carpet" in front of the "press junket" picture taking thing with my popcorn and soda. Yeah, it was kind of dinky. But I still thought it was hilarious. I feel like they could be companion pictures to the pictures of me dressed up in clothes designed by Britney Spears. My friends Stefanie and Sarah took some pictures with my camera for me and indulged my preposterous stage directions for how to do it.

I'm ready for my close-up.

I had decided to Tweet about the experience in live time, and in the intervening time between my arrival and everybody elses, I downloaded a new Tweeter ap for my Android since the shitty free one I had didn't work so well. I posted on Facebook (yes I had that much time to kill I got there that early. I am a dork.) that I was doing this.

But about halfway through the festivities my phone started to lose juice in such a way that I could tell I would need to be more sparse with my tweets if I wanted the thing to last. It really drove the point home about how the nature of Twitter combined (on a device with a low battery no less) is such that you have have a precise economy of language. That situation lends it itself to sound-bite-ish smart ass-y punchlines, so I had to be very deliberate what I decided to tweet. (It makes me think about what I heard Patton Oswalt say about Twitter, which is something to the effect of how it's a fabulous way to work out material because it forces you to be very deliberate and precise with your writing. I agree.) Anyway, I reassembled my Tweets in the order of how I did them for you here:

* I'm @ portage theater 4 britney spears album release party. I was the 1st one here. The popcorn is delicious.

* They have talent bios of brtney imprsnators. One is named JAX. Yes, all caps and 1 syllable.

* http://plixi.com/p/87710740. Me @ recrd release party.

* I bought my raffle ticket. Maybe ill win a big bent piece of cardboard with britney on it.

* Watchg a cover band doing the gogos and tring 2 get us to clap along. I hate audience participation. A cardinal sin.

* What cover band needs 2 lead singers?

* Who puts a flute to dance music? The brit spears military complex.

* An obese man got on stage to talk about his internet radio station.

* Was at world's saddest BSpears new album event. Lazy impersonator, screensaver videos, unsynced Toxic karaoke. And I didn't win the raffle.

*****
Anyway, if you go to see the picture I posted with my phone that my friends took of me, you will notice there is a picture on cardboard near me that says Andrea Eve. She was one of the models that got up and talked about being in a film or her perfume or maybe both. Perhaps she might even have been the one that introduced some of the songs on Britney's album. One of the songs she said was a sequel to another Britney song called "Touch of My Hand." I forget what song she was referring to. I failed to see the connection although everybody knows that "Touch of My Hand" is about masturbation. What else am I leaving out? Oh! The karaoke! So at the end they invited the audience to get on stage and sing a long to a karaoke version of "Toxic." And the karaoke version had the graphics for the words but then also had a video of Britney in the background dressed in the kinda naked-y glittery outfit she wore for part of the "Toxic" video (which I'm imaging might be the outtake or something from when they made the video -- and I remember in one of Brit's making of videos they said it was a closed set because of what she was not wearing for the shooting part of that video.



You may notice there aren't that man people on stage. The annoying DJ guy has his back to the audience and there's the camera guy. And then including me there were 5 or so other people on stage. Excluding staff of the event and other performers there were maybe 10 people there to attend it. 2 of the people standing on stage I bonded with because they were wearing these scarves that have Britney lyrics all over them which I have seen on Britney's website. They were a guy and a girl, and the guy was wearing the same shirt I thought about wearing to the event that I was given as a gift, a huge black tshirt with huge white letters that says "It's Britney, Bitch." It was hilarious. I said to him, "Did you order that off the website?" which is preposterous of course.

I had big plans for the event. I got there early because I was ready to do a Jeff Krulikian "Britney Spears Parking Lot" except that Britney wasn't actually attending the event. Some guy who invited me and my friends to check out his computer shop across from the theater told me that this was (one of?) the only Sony-sanctioned record release events for Britney which was weird. How would he know that? There are so many weird things about that that I don't know where to start on that, but I'll leave it alone for you to think about. He said that one of the guys who organized the event had done graphic design for Britney which also I didn't know what to make of. Were they also the design firm in charge of the screen savers on a loop that were up while we listened to the album? I should also mention that in-between the screen savers this little traffic cone would come up, like it was coming from this person's computer and it had cycled through all the screen savers, and it needed to be clicked on or something.

 I can't believe I didn't think to do that when she actually did come in concert during the Circus Tour. (Which I did not go to because tickets were insanely expensive and also because I pretty much saw the whole show on the internet anyway because everybody posts their footage they took with their phones.) But when she does come, I am so there. I am more interested in the fans, ephemera and mythology of Britney Spears/The Britney Spears Machine then Britney herself as of late. Just this morning I heard Jon Caramanica on the New York Times Popcast talking about Britney's new album and referring to her musical output as being something that is released by Britney in name only: "There is an album that has been released by the name of Britney Spears."

I agree.

I am still deciding my thoughts on the new album. The idea of a "release party" was in interesting to me because the whole thing was released in mainstream media sites out in the open before it was official out. You could actually listen to the whole thing on AOL track by track before it was out.

And oh! Here are all the photos from the event I took, and some that Stefanie and Sarah took at my site on Flickr.