The blue carpet at the Namibian Annual Music Awards (NAMAs) is where dreams go to live.
It’s a place where you take your post in an endless line of journalists, groupies and not so significant others before angling your camera with as much purpose as incessant elbowing by carpet-happy nobodies will allow, and you pray to whatever photography god there is that the show’s stars will linger and your photo won’t blur just as Vanity steps up looking like Mother Claus and the Bride of Dracula.
These are the moments a journalist working the red carpet lives for.
Those two women who, seemingly, have no friends to tell them they look like a Wes Craven Christmas special, the young designer who shows up looking like the proud prince of Zamunda and Lady May channeling her inner Nicki Minaj, dialing it way back and looking pretty but pedestrian in purple but with that perpetual glint of mischief in her eyes that harks back to what we know and love.
I’m talking to Lady May about her make-under just shy of the blue carpet when I’m assaulted.
A 50-year-old Liza Minnelli-looking broad comes up to me all booze, wrinkles and a slight wetness on her chin, grabs my shoulder, spins me to face her, looks me right in the eye and smiles like I’m the kid her maid used to bring to work during school holidays all grown up.
Then she takes a fistful of my hair and yanks it.
Yanks it so hard my eyes water and my knees buckle to accommodate the sudden thrust towards the floor.
Lady May steps back in mild horror, unsure of whether to smile, laugh or put her knuckles up and the woman pulls my hair one, two, three times.
“I love, love, LOVE your hair.”
Seeing as I’m bloody working and Lady May is looking at us both as if the NAMAs are, in actual fact, the circus, I grab her hand, throw it away from me in disgust and say “wow” before turning back to the young star.
The woman is unperturbed. She moves to catch my eye again and asks me if I’m an artist.
I say no.
A singer?
I say no, I’m a journalist and I’m interviewing Lady May who is both of those things. Pointedly.
Minnelli looks through her briefly, says she knows who Lady May is and looks back at my hair and says: “Well, you look like one. A singer. All those curls. Gorgeous.”
Lady May and I don’t know what to say. Selma Kaulinge is inching forward concerned. And we all just look at each other.
Surveying the screws let loose and rolling around on the floor.
Since sanity is certainly too much to ask for, Minnelli hiccups silently and darts her tongue out of her mouth slightly before grabbing my hair one more time.
“I love this!”
Removing her kung fu grip from my mass of soft dreads I say: “Listen, lady. This hair is plaited onto my own hair which is attached to my scalp so… please.”
She looks at it closely and says it’s lovely.
Because she’s not going anywhere and she’s acting as though she may have a real purpose in this life like maybe she’s a silent sponsor or a boozy owner of the sports centre where the NAMAs are being held, I ask her what she does and she says she doesn’t do anything.
Her story is that she lives in Swakopmund and she never gets to dress up and go out so she came out to see the stars.
“Like you,” she says.
Tugging my hair, hiccupping silently before stumbling away like a moth to a flame… towards a woman with a larger than life afro.
