On Saturday morning at BlogHer, my mission was clear: meet famous people.
Luckily for me, the Quaker booth and the Tropicana booth were next-door neighbors, allowing me to handily meet and take photographic evidence with both Giuliana Rancic (from E! News, Fashion Police and, my favorite, Giuliana and Bill on the Style network) and Bob Harper (Biggest Loser trainer extraordinaire).
Naturally, Bob made me a little nervous and I decided to just not say much of anything at all to him to avoid raving like a lunatic. This mostly worked, except for the part where I always feel the need to blurt out, "BIG FAN!" And not even in a full sentence, either. Just like that. BIG FAN! I probably should've followed up with "long-time listener, first-time caller!"
With Giuliana, though, I was surprisingly composed. She had on blue suede heels (I told her that I loved them not only because I'm from Memphis, but also because my blue suede heels were in the car waiting to be put on for parties that night), and she asked ME how MY day was going. I'm serious. She wanted to know if I was enjoying the conference, and I told her how much I love her show and how great I think it is that she's been so public with her fertility struggles and what it surely means for so many women going through the same thing. And then I told her that I'd just met Bob (why was I name dropping to Giuliana?) and she said she was going to have to pop over and say hi. Which made me wonder something I've wondered many times in my life: are all celebrities friends? Or at least know each other? Are there meetings?
Anywho. I went to possibly the best BlogHer session of all time that day, on how to pitch a book. I give it such high praise really because it was the one session where I felt I walked away with knowledge and tools and a good slew of stuff I honestly didn't know before. Because if we're not talking about actually learning shit, you can scratch that and move up to the No. 1 slot the humor bloggers session I went to later that afternoon. Toward the beginning, one woman raised her hand and asked, "Is there going to be any format to this or are we all just going to talk? Because you've got a room full of humor bloggers, so we're pretty much just going to try to out-funny the person before us."
And we pretty much did. And it was pretty much hysterical.
That night came parties, parties and yet more parties -- but before those parties a girl's gotta get looking all snazzy. And when you're not staying in the convention hotel, there's only one place to do that: inside of your compact rental car. Inside of your compact rental car in a brightly lit parking garage. Inside of your compact rental car, in a brightly lit parking garage, at a perfectly reasonable daytime hour that is hypothetically no later than 7:30 p.m.
So yes. Yes, that was interesting to pull off, in case you were curious. (Pun TOTALLY intended.)
First up for the evening was the Social Fiesta, where there was so much Latin food that I couldn't eat one of everything, which was both personally and professionally disappointing to me. I did make some killer nachos from the nacho bar and ate probably the best flan I have ever had.
Next up was Aiming Low, where the food was not as delightful -- fried mac'n'cheese that I had high expectations for didn't hit the mark, and I accidentally ate the one truffle full of crazy tangy fruit stuffs and not pure, unadulterated CHOCOLATE -- but I did manage to get a lovely 15-minute chair massage and made some buddies who had heard me speaking in the humor blogger session earlier that day. We hit it off pretty much immediately -- and one of them was even a yeti, a single, childless blogger! -- and we left Aiming Low together, headed to CheeseburgHER.
Now, at this point I could not have stuffed another morsel into my mouth, particularly not a McDonald's cheeseburger or fries, but there was also a huge dance floor and a lot of drunk ladies and BEDS for sitting. Yes. BEDS. I danced to Bel Biv Devoe's "Poison" and my all-time Friday favorite, "It Takes Two" by Rob Base and DJ EZ-Rock. And I only slopped about half of a vodka soda onto the dance floor in the process. Success!
And this is sort of where our story ends. I say sort of, because we can't forget the next morning, when I woke up and spent no less than two solid hours fitting everything into my luggage. But I sat on that suitcase and I zipped it up and everything made it back to Memphis, safe and sound. And, incidentally, I didn't spend a dime on food the entire day of travelling. Whenever I got hungry, I just pulled another treat from the swag bag.
Sigh. Here's to another BlogHer in the books. Don't know if I'll be back next year, gals. But I'll be back eventually.
cheers,
elizabeth
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