Gaga

Lady Gaga came through our lane at the airport yesterday - it was a big enough deal that we were informed ahead of time when she would be coming and could we please make sure she got through in a timely fashion.  In and out.  No problem.

Only about fifteen minutes later than when we were told she would be coming through, there she was in one of the strangest outfits I've ever seen, being led by a couple police officers, a couple handlers, and one very tall bodyguard.

While I do get starstruck with the celebrities that grace DIA, I was more intrigued by her persona than anything else.  This was not Stefani Germanotta hurrying to get on an airplane just like everyone else.  She didn't break character once, and even glamorously tip toed through the metal detector in her fishnets because she had to take her five-inch heel-less platform shoes off.  Stefani probably wouldn't have given two shits about walking flat-footed.

Everyone in her group - the couple handlers and the bodyguard, were a little harried and a lot frantic.  Gaga took her time, allowing the whole checkpoint, employees and passengers alike, to nearly stop dead in their tracks while they watched.  Nobody approached her, nobody called her name.  She was stared at from her fans because she was the Mother to their Little Monsters, as she calls them.  She was stared at from everyone else because she was peculiar and eccentric, nothing like they had ever seen before.

We wondered why she didn't travel via private jet but it was clear as she proceeded through the screening process that she thrived on the attention that completely surrounded her.  I'm sure her dark sunglasses allowed her to take it in, to look back at the people whose eyes were fixated on her, without them ever noticing.  I'm also sure she took great pleasure in taking forever to walk from point A to point B, mainly because those damn shoes had to have been a pain in the ass to walk in.

I wonder if she is ever Stefani.  Is there anyone in her life with whom she can be a normal young woman around?  Doe she ever unzip Gaga, strap on a pair of sneakers, and leave the horse-hoovish shoes behind?  It just seems like an awful lot of work to be Lady Gaga, every move fiercely calculated, every step planned. 

When she got to the part where she would have to take off those shoes, she hesitated a little...she calculated.  I offered her the chair to sit in and she looked back at it and turned back around, again hesitating.  Needed to calculate again.  I can only imagine that she thought she would rather cut off her feet before being seen wrenching those things off in a plastic airport chair.  Not Gaga-like, and certainly not glamorous.

Two years ago this young woman was a nobody, and now she has the power to silence an airport.  It's unreal, actually.  I have a tremendous amount of respect for the musician that she is, the voice that she has, and the gigantic balls that she must have so delicately hidden beneath her tiny frame.

More power to Gaga...