I’d hoped to walk the carpet with Gloria and our producer, but the timing of our arrivals hadn’t aligned. We’d tried to coordinate, but the awful weather from the past few days had everything in LA backed up even more than usual. The limos were taking three or four times longer than normal to do the drop-offs by the tent-covered red carpet.
The rain was affecting everyone and everything. The sudden deluge of water arrived on the heels of a years-long drought, and I swore it made people crazy. My hairstylist had no choice but to scrap her original hair plan for me because of the humidity. Instead of going with the loose style we’d originally planned, my hair was pulled back and pinned up in a complicated fishtail braid that had been set with what I suspected was equivalent to my weight in hairspray. I imagined that my hair was so firmly in place that a missile would’ve bounced off upon impact.
The experience of walking the carpet was even more intense than I’d expected, and I’d been warned it would be wild. The tent made things louder, and the confinement within the space made getting around more difficult, especially in a gown. Kerri Anderson, my least favorite actress/human, was just ahead of me in the press line, and I had to force myself not to roll my eyes as I watched her make a spectacle of herself.
For starters, she’d had her hair dyed to match the trainwreck she was wearing. That meant her once purple hair was now pink on the top and about two inches of the bottom were dyed lime green. It wasn’t attractive in any way, something a good stylist should’ve told her, but considering how ugly the dress was I was betting the stylist in question usually did Romani weddings.
I didn't think it was wrong to suspect that since the unbelievably tacky gown Kerri was in took up a ridiculous amount of real estate. The top of the dress consisted of scraps of satin that didn't do much to cover her up. Thus, her giant fake boobs were so on display I was certain there'd be a nip-slip by the end of the night. After all, it was her signature move.
The bottom of the gown was no better. It was tight and had a keyhole slit up the middle that matched the one on the top. I suspected Kerri though the world would stop spinning on its axis if she couldn’t show off her underwear. A ten-foot train further solidified the fashion catastrophe, but what put it on top of the tackiest thing ever list were the hundreds of little golden bells on the train. Even if I’d been farther down the line, I’d have heard her coming.
Much like Lady Gaga in her meat dress, I knew Kerri would be the talk of the town for the rest of the week as people panned her fashion choice. That was why she’d worn it. She undoubtedly had her fingers crossed that Saturday Night Live would spoof the gown that weekend.
Having worked with her, I knew her motto was that any publicity was good publicity. The girl was crazy annoying, but there was no getting rid of her, kind of like cockroaches. Kerri got some attention initially because her parents, Ivory and Hanson Anderson, had been tabloid gold while they’d been married. Arguments, affairs, partying, selling stories about each other to keep the attention going—they’d spent years being famous purely because they were in the gossip rags on display in the supermarket checkout line.
The majority of the reason Kerri became a tabloid darling herself was due to her uncle, Donald Montague, one of the biggest producers in Hollywood. Why he pulled strings for her talentless ass was a mystery to me, but for whatever reason, he did.
Kerri and I met on the set of the soap opera that had given me my first hit of fame. We’d played sisters—fraternal twins—and the amount of acting it took to pretend to have any kind of connection at all with her was staggering. Plain and simple, the girl was a walking, talking headache. We’d never gotten along great, and as the years went by, not great devolved into not at all. She frequently auditioned for the same roles I did, and anytime I bagged one she’d wanted, I’d see some snarky tweets from her about real talent. As if she had any idea what that was.
It had been a few months since I’d last seen her, and I’d have been just as happy to keep the streak going. More than once, I caught her looking over her shoulder at me with a snide little smirk as she walked the carpet. The only thing that kept me from flipping her off was the knowledge that hundreds of cameras were capturing every moment.