That was really cheek to cheek!

September 12, 2024

If you decide to splurge on a meet-and-greet with your favorite performer, brace yourself for more than floods of tears, blacking out and being overwhelmed with unspeakable happiness – you’ll also be expected to follow some safety rules: no lifting her off the ground, no kissing, keeping your phone switched off… On October 5, 2014, after a two-and-a-half-hour show called artRave: The ARTPOP Ball, Patrik and 19 other fans had the chance to spend 45 minutes in the presence of a woman who, as he puts it, has changed his life – and he’d been saving up for two years so that he could go and tell her that in person.

“I’d spent ages planning what I’d ask her and all that I’d tell her, but the moment the door opened and this tiny person walked in, my mind went completely blank. She ordered a white wine spritzer and encouraged each of us to ask her a question. She said she knew how much we’d paid for the meet-and-greet and that she’d like to make the event – capped off with a photo-op – a little more rewarding. I don’t really think she’s ever been into meeting fans for money. When she’d invite people backstage during her Monster Ball and Born This Way Ball tours, a few fans would get picked to go and see her after the show for free and she’d often wait for them sitting on a sofa, tired but happy. That’s what I think was the purest kind of meet-and-greet.

At the Prague event I attended in 2014, though, a lot of people either asked her nothing at all, or the questions they put to her were about her opinion on Rihanna, that sort of thing. But then someone asked her to sing a part of a song and she – just six feet away – treated us to an a cappella rendition of ‘Born This Way’. That’s when a fellow fan from Slovakia and I had the first of our several teary-eyed meltdowns.”

When it was his turn, Patrik told Lady Gaga what he – now, ten years later – calls a clichéd story about how she and her music saved his life: “Every other fan tells her that. But that’s just how it was for me – and for many others, too. And why not? When I talk about the meeting today, many people see it as a missed opportunity – me telling her something she hears three times a day and now she’s heard it again, from a person she didn’t know existed until then. But I didn’t care. I wasn’t exaggerating, that’s simply how I felt at the time, and I still feel that way. It’s a bond or a connection that’s hard to describe, and you can’t easily explain it to those who’ve never experienced it themselves or don’t feel the need to form such connections. But I’m grateful to have it.”

“When my photo from the meet-and-greet finally came in, I was surprised to see it showed us holding hands. I had no idea we’d done that. ‘That was really cheek to cheek,’ she told me as I was leaving. The next thing I remember is standing in tears in front of the O2 Arena concert venue and I think I spotted [the Czech celebrity] Sagvan Tofi passing by, though I might have just imagined that.”

Jazz & Piano: One for the Ages

“In 2023, when I went to see her jazz concerts in Vegas, I was there alone. The day before the first show, I met another fan, Millie, in front of the Haus of Gaga [a pop-up museum of Gaga’s costumes] and we ended up going to the concert together. We both had sixth-row tickets. I was wearing this huge orange costume and was overheating, crammed between two strangers. Suddenly I saw Millie beckoning me from the front row. She was very determined and she insisted we wouldn’t sit in our assigned seats. I walked over, and she told me there had been two vacant seats in the first row for a while now, the show was going start any minute and that we had no choice but to fill them in. I was pretty nervous, but when the lights went down two minutes before the show began, I plopped into my seat – and suddenly, there she was: Gaga emerged some six feet away from us.

I know that many in the fandom hate it when people in back-row seats claim they made eye contact with Lady Gaga, but from where we were sitting, we were looking her eye to eye practically the whole time. And unlike everyone else in the audience, who were dressed in black suits and gowns, I was wearing a loud orange outfit that was quite eye-catching in itself. But I kept everything else fairly low-key, I didn’t think it was appropriate to yell at her – after all, this was a jazz performance, not a Chromatica Ball gig. Still, there were a few people in the front row who were trying to get her attention at any cost. So the intimate moments in the acoustic piano ballads, when most of the audience hall was quietly moved, were disrupted by shouts from the handful of people who behaved as if they were in a stadium mosh pit, spoiling the atmosphere for everyone. As for me, compared to the endless wait before her big shows, I was happy enough not to feel exhausted and, thanks to the intimate setting, to be able to hear her close up and watch her expressions while singing.

At the second concert, I was back in my sixth-row seat, surrounded by people whose average age was around 60, but we were all equally pumped up for the show. It was really quite an unexpected and cool moment, feeling butterflies in my stomach because Gaga would take that stage and sharing it with people generations older than myself, the likes of whom you’d never meet at the Stade de France crowd barriers.”

Lady Gaga’s Las Vegas jazz residency concerts are usually followed by an after-party, a performance by her New-York friend, jazz musician Brian Newman, held in a small, intimate club. “When you buy tickets for this jazz night, they assign you a spot at a table. I was seated next to a middle-aged married couple who asked me straight away whether I was there for the music or hoping Gaga would show up. I admitted I was there for both, and the husband said he felt the same, and that they’d already visited the club several times for that reason. When the curtains in the corner of the room opened before the show and Gaga’s bodyguard Peter came in, I knew immediately what – or who – was coming next. She’s here, she’s here, she’s here! She entered wearing sneakers and a jumper and nobody in the dim auditorium took much notice of her. We – my neighbor and I – were both quite blown away. Again, she was sitting just six feet away, but we agreed we wouldn’t stare and invade her personal space. While we were taking a video of Brian’s awesome show, our cameras occasionally strayed a few millimeters to the right for a few seconds. By then, more people had become aware of her presence, but nobody bothered her.”

Patrik lives in Prague; you can follow him on Instagram or X (formerly Twitter).

Translated from Czech by Petr Ondráček.