Yesterday afternoon I got a call from RTL asking me to swing by Macy’s to do a quick report on Kim Kardashian’s appearance to promote her new fragrance. It was…madness. There was a line out the door and around the block of people waiting for the opportunity to get their photo taken with her, and there were a few times when I thought I was going to get body-checked straight out of the press area. (I can’t tell you how many times I was ordered to MOVE…NOW by the security team. A please would have been nice, but hey, the crowd was intense, and they were just trying to maintain control.)
Anyway. It was pretty interesting to see this kind of celebrity scene up-close. More interesting than the Jonas Brothers premiere, actually, because that was more or less a standard red-carpet walk (the kind you see on ET all the time), while this event involved Kim actually interacting with her fans…sort of.
What fascinated me was how Kim responded to each person as they approached her, especially in light of the fact that by most accounts she’s a very fan-friendly celeb: she barely looked at them, gave them a sort of half-smile, and then fell into her standard chin-down-lips-together pose for the picture. I started to sort of bristle about this – this is incredibly exciting for her fans, and an actual “hello” would probably make their day – but then I realized that I can’t even begin to understand what her degree of celebrity entails. And I suppose the only way to handle that kind of massive attention is to be polite, but to not engage too much…mostly for the sake of time. That was a seriously long line.
