Careful Not to Step in the Name Droppings

Okay guys - this post defines why the blog is called "Hollywood Flakes." Brace yourselves.

Last night Spikeand I went to a charity event for the Cedars-Sinai Medical Genetics Institute. We thought it would just be a pleasant evening with free steak. The event was called Sports Spectacular and involved a silent auction, dinner and presentation of life-time achievement awards to notable athletes. That's about all I knew before we got there.

We arrived at the hotel for the event and went down the stairs to the party. At the bottom of the stairs there was a red carpet the split two ways. One was the way for the "celebrities" and the other short route dumped the "nobodies" ignominiously off into the foyer. Spike make a desperate leap for the celebrity stretch, but a bouncer quickly ushered him towards the walk of shame.

So we're standing next to the red carpet to see what kind of celebrities the event would scrounge up. Next thing we know Snoop Dog is standing 3 feet from us doing an interview with his entire eclectic entourage on his heels. I quickly surmised that this may be a more prestigious event than first anticipated. Upon closer inspection of the crowd, found other notables milling around like Ms. California, Reggie Bush, The Rock, Robert Hoary, LL Cool J, Jerome Bettis, Chuck Liddell , Jerry Rice and lot of other enormous black guys with 24 caret diamond earings who looked like somebodies. Liddell was just standing there all by his lonesome so Spike introduced himself and let himself be known as an Ultimate Fighting Fan. Chuck is pretty nice for a guy who kills people for a living.

We found our dining table and sat down with a bunch of other people from Spike's office. There was an empty seat next to me and we weren't sure who was planning on sitting there since everyone from the firm had already shown up. Then a 6-4, 310 pound man strolled up, introduced himself and sat down next to me. Apparently, the whole deal with the dinner is that every one of the 100+ tables would have some famous athlete sitting at it. Ours turned out to be Marcus Spears, the defensive end from the Dallas Cowboys. Lucky thing he sat next to me since I lived in Texas for a while and I proceeded to gab his ear off for most of the dinner. The only bad thing about it was that a 300 pound man sitting at a crowded circular dinner table doesn't work in the real world and I spent all of dinner playing hardcore footsie with him. There is no way I could ever win a game of footsie with Spears but by golly I tried.

The presentation was similar to most other award shows. They would have an actor or other celebrity get up and do some little spiel to introduce the athlete that was being honored. Tom Arnold did a tasteless monologue (big surprise), but we got to see a lot of the Torino Olympians, Kelly Slater, Jerome Bettis and Jimmy Conners all get awards for lifetime achievement. George Lopez got up to talk about a kidney transplant Cedars-Sinai had facilitated but was totally drunk. He started calling everyone obscene names, and slandering the entire crowd (which included a lot of kids) so John Salley had to come up and physically pick him up and carry him off stage which was cheered by everyone in the audience. A guy with just one kidney really shouldn't drink that much. Snoop Dog and The Rock both did presentations but after the Lopez disaster, everyone really just spent the rest of the ceremony apologizing for him. Lopez pretty much undermined an otherwise classy event and I'm sure the people organizing the show have already burned his house down in revenge.

So it was fun. I didn't know that I could get so excited by just being in the same room with all those celebrities but it really was pretty trippy. Spike had to remind me on more than one occasion not to point. I just felt like I was at the zoo and wanted to run around to everyone and poke them to see what they would do. The highlight for me was seeing The Rock (Dwayne Johnson) since I went through a period a few years ago when I watched WWE every day with a loser boyfriend. Got rid of the boyfriend, never could rid my heart of The Rock.

Life is good in Hollywood. Unless you're George Lopez, that is.