She's So Lucky She's A Star

I just have to take a moment today to bask in the total satisfaction of fulfilling a lifelong ambition: I bought tickets to see Britney live on her Circus Tour of London next June!!!!! Damn it feels good to say that!

My Britney obsession is well known amongst my friends. Since the first time I saw the video to Baby....One More Time, I've secretly wanted to be Britney Spears. She was just so pretty, she danced like a demon and man, she had abs that made me want to actually want to go on a diet and work out 7 days a week - for about 5 seconds. Then reality came crashing down (7 days a week? In what lifetime?) and I hit on a much better idea: follow Britney's every move like a stalker and live THROUGH her. That way I'd be part of the global phenomenon, but could enjoy her life from the comfort of my couch, potato chips in hand.

Since then, I have adored her from afar for pretty much her entire career, give or take a few episodes of umbrella-wielding crazy and a head shaving incident or two (and even then I followed the madness religiously, so she never lost my loyalty; just my respect for a short time). I say pretty much her entire career, because there was a brief spell in my first year at Cape Tech where I became too cool for Britney Spears.

I'd recently met Shoes, and he was into house, back in the day when the scene was still referred to as "rave".I very quickly immersed myself in the club scene, and suddenly I found that the only kind of raving I could do was with glowsticks and lots of shiny lycra; raving about Britney Spears was very much frowned upon. We were far too cool to listen to "commercial" music.

So I denied my Britney obsession for all I was worth, and instead listened to electronically manufactured beats with soaring female lyrics about peace, love and chasing the rush. To this day I still love club music, psy trance being my particular favourite. But it was always on the cards that I was going to give in to my guilty pleasure and return to the pure pop paradise that is Miss Spears.

I was one of the millions who watched in horror as one of the world's biggest ever celebrities paid the ultimate price for superstardom, and one of the loyal-to-the-point-of-dementia fans sitting tight in her corner, cheering her on as she seemed to pull her life back from the brink. In my heart of hearts, I will always think that Brit Brit is a little piece of crazy, but that just makes her more interesting. I'm glad for her that she's got things back on track, partly because, hey! she's human and deserves to be happy, just like the rest of us.

And partly because on 4 June 2009, I will be watching in awe as the Queen of Pop throws down for London's O2 arena. It will be one of the highlights of my concert trips: fire jugglers, live animals, lip synching and all. The only difference between then and now? With the wisdom that comes from experience, I would now much rather be Lopz than Britney. But I will never get tired of dancing to Baby...One More Time in my room, hairbrush in hand!