I'm quite surprised to say it, but I now have a Clay Aiken story.
Pull up a chair! (And this will be much quicker than how it was told to me, in excrutiating detail.)
So, hanging out Saturday night with lots of people (before the fun part), and one of the guys was telling about taking his daughter and soon to be stepson to the Clay Aiken/Kelly Clarkson concert in Raleigh. They had to pull some serious strings to get tickets. His little girl (who is cute as a button)is a major Clay fan.
Well, this guy is a contractor...builds really nice, huge homes. They used their contacts with some company to get the tickets. Turns out? They ended up in the VIP section. In Raleigh.
Insert the obnoxious Clay relative story here.
Well, they found out they were in the VIP section when, right before the concert, the overly dressed up couple sitting next to this guy's fiancee turned to her and asked how she was related to Clay. Because THEY were his second cousins. First off, if they really knew Clay well? They would have known that this group wasn't related to Clay. When the fiancee said they didn't know Clay, the second cousins threw their noses in the air and said "We thought *this* was the VIP section for *family only*!"
Can we talk about how bad I felt for Clay when I heard that? Luckily, this family (because both of them had never watched AI, they were just going by what the kids had to say about it) recognized that these were distant relatives trying to live off his fame. But man.
Well, then, during the concert, a security guard walked to their section. This guy looks over in time to see the security guard point at him. He was kind of freaked and did the whole "Who, me?" bit, to which the security guard shook his head and pointed at his daughter, then motioned them over. So this guy picks up his daughter (she's six) and follows the security guard who takes them down near the stage.
Well, he stands their for a few minutes with his daughter, trying to figure out what's going on. Then another security guard walks up behind the barricade that keeps people from getting directly to the stage and reaches for his daughter. He did the natural thing, which was to turn away and say "what the hell?" Turns out, they wanted to put her on stage with Clay. At no point did they ask him if it was okay to put his daughter on stage, which I find irritating. But he earned major points because when the guard said this, he looked at his daughter and asked her if she wanted to or if she'd rather go back to her seat. Her response? "Oh, I can do it Daddy."
So the guard took her over to stand near the stage on a chair, which meant she was within a few feet of Clay. Due to a shortage of time because of a deviation from the schedule early in the concert, she ended up not going on stage, but she spent three songs getting an unobstructed view of Clay. Turns out (and I'm going to guess this might have something to do with the VIP section and the fact it was very near the stage) Clay had, prior to the show, pointed out a couple of little girls to come up on stage from the audience, and she was one of them.
The bad part? The soon to be stepson didn't know the exact circumstances of what was going on and was bawling his eyes out because he thought his stepdad had chosen her over him. They had the hardest time explaining what had happened.
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