Brit-NEY! Brit-NEY! Brit-NEY!

I can sum the night up in two words - three if I don't delete the explitives: it was a [fucking] awesome trainwreck!

I met Amanda at her work after my work, and we changed from our jeans into "trenchcoat and my underwear" (a line from Britney's "Outrageous"), took a few pictures, then changed back into our jeans because, well, what if they searched us at the door and asked us to take off our coats?

Got down to the House of Blues and got in line just after 6:00. The girl in line behind us looked kind of like Alanis Morissette or Linda Cardellini; mostly, she looked like the ugly dorky girl in a movie, who suddenly becomes really hot once she loses the glasses and leather coat (see: She's All That). She was there on her own, so we started talking to her, and found out she was a correspondent from Life & Style magazine, and that up until a few weeks ago, had been the Britney correspondent for Star magazine (we'd just bought one at 7-11 - can't miss the scoop on TomKat's impending divorce, especially not during National Teeny-Bopper Week!).

So of course, I had to ask her, "How does it feel to have to use words like 'canoodling,' and end sentences with exclamation points all the time?" Because that totally goes against everything I believe in...

"Actually, I don't use that many exclamation points, but I do like to use 'canoodling' - you kinda have to when you're covering couples' news." Uh-huh.

We lost our reporter friend once we got inside - I'm guessing she wasn't trying to push to the front to get the best view of the beauty spot Britney'd drawn on her cheek (did I mention mine are real?) - and ended up standing sort of off to the left, in about the fifth "row" of people crowding the still-empty stage. I was standing behind two pudgy gay guys and their Amazonian hag, so for a while there I was worried that I wouldn't be able to see anything. This fear was compounded when, during the first intro act, my peep-toe wedges were turning out to be too much and I decided to brave it in my stocking-feet, losing another two inches in the process. I did have the genius idea to buckle my shoes' ankle straps through my beltloops, though, which gave me one less thing to hold in my hand, and also allowed me to inadvertently "kick" anyone who got too close to me.

The show was supposed to start at 8, but the first opener went on at around 7:40. It was a deejay act - a black guy whose job was to do the actual spinning, and a white guy whose job appeared to be looking and acting like "Beat-Box" Blake Lewis from this year's American Idol. He wandered around the stage in his Red Sox t-shirt, drinking cans of Corona, occasionally pretending to help his friend work the tables, then took off his shirt and started breakdancing on the stage. When he got up, his jeans had dropped low enough to show plumbers crack (ew) and hip bones (hot), and he didn't bother pulling them back up for the remainder of their 90-minute set. Toward the end, you could tell the Corona had gotten to him, as he actually started gyrating over the stage and then toward the audience. Yeah, I probably could've watched this guy all night, and if the opportunity had presented itself, I probably would've made out with him. In fact, I'm adding him to my list of "People I'd Cheat on Lui With" - right next to the real Blake Lewis.

So after my boyfriend and his friend finished playing their ridiculously long set of pop music, the crowd got riled up and started yelling, "Brit-NEY! Brit-NEY! Brit-NEY!" I was almost embarrassed to hear myself chanting along with them. But then Britney didn't come out - another pair of deejays did, and neither of these two looked like an American Idol contestant, nor did they strip, nor would I have wanted them to. One looked kinda like a rabbi, and the other was sort of GQ-ish, but I wasn't really in the mood for GQ last night. And these two guys played a more rock/alternative set, and actually ended up getting booed - hadn't they ever heard of playing to the crowd?

Britney finally came out just after 10:00. Amanda & I had planned to link arms with the girls next to us so that no one could elbow their way through, but we accidentally lost those girls and ended up sailing on the wave of people pushing toward the stage, landing third row center. So my height worries were for naught, as the two girls now in front of me barely graced 5' - incidentally, they both also had really bad tattoos on the backs of their necks (one was a turquoise & purple starfish). One girl behind me apologized for basically eating my hair, but it was kind of like that, and I was just glad it wasn't a guy directly behind me dancing, for fear of Britney turning him on - I could hear the gay guys I'd left a few rows back screaming, "Britney! Omigod, Britney!" as though they were trying to get her attention, or crying out in pain as though Britney was dying or something.

Britney was wearing a bikini top and a miniskirt with fishnets and go-go boots, and a really bad mousey-brown wig. ("My old Rocky wig is in better condition than that," I told Amanda later.) She'd lost a lot of the baby weight, but people will undoubtedly say that she's not up to that old Britney standard because she did have a little bit of a belly, and when she crouched down on the stage, there were rolls. So what? I'm glad she looks human - now I can go around saying my body looks like Britney Spears's! And yeah, she was totally lip-synching to the album tracks - so much so that at the end (of the four songs she performed), when she said, "Thank you! And these are my dancers!", no one further back than, oh, let's say me, could hear her, because she wasn't even miked.

But she's a beautiful girl, and as good of an entertainer as ever. Her facial expressions are always spot on, and the girl can shake it. At one point during "Breathe On Me," her dancers (all female, cos apparently she's learned her lesson with the male dancers after K-Fed) pulled a guy up out of the audience, sat him on the chair and danced around him. The guy looked kind of like a more attractive Elliot Yamin (it was obviously Idols Night at the Britney Spears gig), and he was good, playing to the dancers and the crowd. He made a cha-ching motion when he first got on stage, and later leaned back toward Britney's undulating hips, causing her to make a surprised, "what a weirdo" face at us, as though we girls were all in on a secret. "She's so cute," Amanda said.

And honestly, I feel sorry for the girl. She's my age, and started her career almost ten years ago. So basically, she missed out on the high school experience, and probably hasn't emotionally developed much past the age of 16. And she's got the media (who are always right, because they're so smart, while she herself is so dumb) following her around all the time, and whatever our gossip mag friend says about her "asking for it" by "walking around Hollywood in her underwear," that can't be easy. All 20-somethings party, make relationship mistakes, and go a little crazy sometimes - it's just that this one has been made a laughing stock for it, while most of us just get to slip by under the radar. So I totally don't blame her for wanting to come out to the HOB and do a 15-minute set, just reassure herself that her fans really do still like her.

I got home close to midnight and discovered that the bottoms of my feet were black, so I took a quick shower before crawling into bed with an already half-asleep Lui. He asked how the show was, and I gave him the gist: four songs, lip-synch, bad wig.

"Don't worry, sweetie," he mumbled. "Taylor will be better."

Oh, I know.