A walk on the wild side

WE THINK WE understand what it's like to be a celebrity now that we all know someone famous: "I dated that 'American Idol' reject in high school!"; "That guy walked up to me on the street and wouldn't stop talking about how much he loves his fiance, Katie Holmes!" But to see what it's really like, I decided to travel to the white-hot center of fame.

Unfortunately, the closest I could get was Friday's "Daytime Emmys," which was held in Los Angeles for the first time -- and thus immediately undid whatever the L.A. Times Festival of Books was trying to accomplish for the city's image.

I convinced rock star and "General Hospital" actor Rick Springfield to let me walk down the red carpet with him in front of the Kodak Theater, where he was opening the award show with a medley. As we rode in a limo from the Renaissance Hotel to cover nearly an entire half-block to the theater, Springfield recognized some of his fans. "You always recognize the hard cores," he said. When I asked him how he remembered their faces from his concerts, he mumbled something about seeing them from the stage. I think his wife, Barbie, was buying this. We were dropped off in front of the red carpet, where we pointlessly tried to push onto the Tokyo-subwayesque entrance along with hundreds of great-looking people I didn't recognize, just like when I tried to get into parties in high school. "This is kind of dorky," admitted Springfield.

Eventually, with the help of a 270-pound bouncer blocking for us, we got on the carpet. Taking a look at the line to our left that led to interviews with SOAPnet host Lisa Rinna, Springfield's publicist immediately broke right, yanked us along and barked an audible: "We're going right to Mark Steines! We're going right to Mark Steines!" We sneaked in line to be interviewed by "Entertainment Tonight's" Steines, whose questions were indeed worth breaking back into the crowd for. He opened with: "Are you nervous at all?" When Springfield said that he was, the wily Steines hit him with, "Come on, what are you nervous about?" It was the kind of rope-a-dope Tim Russert employs.