Premieres

by digby

The past couple of days have featured a lot of super excited fans on TV totally thrilled at the opportunity to meet their idols.

This was Monday:

It’s not exactly a national holiday, but there are some people who are treating tonight’s New Moon premiere in Los Angeles as if it were one.

Kestlie Stefanelli, a 14-year-old from Truckee, Calif., has taken three days off from school so she could camp out near the theater in the Westwood Village neighborhood of L.A. She and her mother, Laurie, are two of an estimated 500 people who started arriving on Thursday with pup tents, lawn chairs and sleeping bags in hopes of securing a good spot on or near the red carpet?

“Only one of my teachers knows what I’m actually doing,” Kestlie told us yesterday. “I told her I was going to L.A. and she just gave me my homework ahead of time.”

Mom Laurie said she thinks “half of the teachers would be very excited if they knew what she was doing.”

Many made the same pilgrimage trip last year for the Twilight premiere. And this time around, a couple is said to have come all the way from Australia to camp out. Amy Oeklers, 27, flew in from Minneapolis, while her friend actually made the 30-hour drive by car.

Oeklers plans on dressing as a certain vampire tonight.

“I like to dress up as Alice Cullen so I have two Twilight costumes,” said Oeklers, a mom and grad student. “But they’re from last year, so I have an Alice New Moon costume I’ll be wearing. It’s the same outfits she wears in the cardboard stand-ups and the action figures.”

This was today:

College students ditched class, employees skipped work and some huddled in the cold overnight just to make sure they get an orange wristband Wednesday that would let them meet Sarah Palin.

A line of more than a thousand people — some sporting Palin Power stickers and Palin T-shirts — moved slowly into a Barnes & Noble store Wednesday to see the former Republican vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor on the first stop of her “Going Rogue” book tour. During the hours they waited, some broke out in chants of “Palin! Palin! Palin!”

Scores more who couldn’t get wristbands awaited Palin’s arrival outside, braving the cold and yelling. “USA!” and “Sarah, Sarah!” at an event that took on the feel of a political pep rally.

“She’s a person of faith, she has a family, she has gone through a lot of the trials and tribulations we have. I’d vote for her in a heartbeat,” said Lana Smith, a dispatcher at a bus company who took the day off work and had been waiting in line since 5:30 a.m.

“Someday I hope her name is up in lights and I’ll have had the privilege of meeting her,” Smith said.

I don’t really have a point except to note that entertainment figures mean a lot to people during hard economic times.

And vampires of all kinds can be very attractive.

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