My experience meeting Kenny Rogers!

I stood, off to the side, isolated from everyone else, shifting from one foot to the other nervously.

(“I’m not getting back there. They would have grabbed me by now if I was. Are they just planning to keep me here, like a security risk, until it is all over with?”)

Such is the feeling when you are attempting to be cleared to meet a celebrity. At the Kenny Rogers concert, while the rest of the audience is watching the opening act with interest (or polite indifference), I am behind the stage, waiting for the local security staff to relay to Kenny’s security staff that I am here and I am supposed to get backstage (actually, “backstage” is a dark area between two tour buses). While I don’t have the physical pass coveted by so many others who are eyeing me from the “cattle” side of the barricades, my waning confidence tells me I still have what it takes.

“But Kenny TOLD me I could get backstage,” I want to wail. “He TOLD me to tell you guys to tell his manager to tell him when I get here!” Instead, I relay the same information in a quiet, dignified, professional journalistic-type way.

And so here I stand.

The first group has already filed into the sacred shroud in the dark to meet the man responsible for making The Gambler a household phrase for decades. Now, the second and final group, including my friends Jason and Ken, are making their way back, back…out of my line of sight. Jason, who has followed Dolly Parton around for years….so often that she has her own pet nickname for him, is wearing a specially-made and bedazzled country shirt with Dolly’s autograph on one side, hoping he will get Kenny to sign the other side.

(“And he probably will,” I pout.)

Then I see the city’s police chief standing nearby. “Great,” I think. “I know him. Maybe I can try and convince him to pretend to arrest me, and as he walks by the buses I can just kind of b-llll-ennnn-d into the line. Yeah, that could work.”

Just then I see one of the local security guys emerge from the buses and walk my way.

(“Is this the part where I get escorted back among the masses? In front of all these people? How emBARRASSing!”)

Instead, he thrusts a pass into my hand. “You better hurry,” he says, and motions with his thumb behind me toward the darkness of the buses.

And so, copies of the newspaper that feature my interview with Kenny Rogers growing warm and wrinkled in my hand, I trot to the “sacred area,” ready to meet the singer I had previously chatted with on the phone, get my picture with him, and give him copies of the interview born of our phone conversation.

(“Never had a doubt I would get backstage.”)

Want to check out my interview with Kenny Rogers? Just click here!