Meeting "The Man"

After months of psyching myself out for the D-day, I was strangely calm and collected on Thursday morning. I woke up, had coffee and some toast, took a shower and got ready. I even caught a little bit of the American Idol finale while getting dressed.

It wasn't until I drove closer and closer to Plaza Indonesia that I started to feel nervous.

A little background story. Months ago, when I found out that Ben Folds was really coming to Jakarta, I told the girls in the office I was going to meet him. I told them I had several plans, but one of them was I was gonna ask my sister, who works for Cleo magazine, if there was any chance they were getting an interview with him and I would offer myself to do it. Now bear in mind that I hadn't even talked to my sister about this plan :D But I had no qualms about offering myself because I have written for some magazines as contributor and I have done several interviews with international artists during my radio days. It was just a matter whether the magazine was interested in covering the show/artist or whether the promoter agreed to grant them the interview. Like I said on my previous post, I had no control about the outcome, but I had faith in it anyway. And like so many times before, I luck out. Majorly.

Several weeks ago, my sister told me that Cleo was going to be one of the media partners for this concert, though she still wasn't sure they were getting an interview. On Monday, 3 days before the show, my sister told me that it was confirmed; they were scheduled for an interview with Ben Folds on Thursday, 26th of May at 1 PM. Right after the press conference.

So there I was driving to Plaza Indonesia for the press conference, with my sister in the passenger seat. Between feeling nervous and cold (it was a rather cold morning), I desperately needed to go to the bathroom so we were in a hurry when we got out of my car in the parking lot. Which caused me to forget something quite important. Which would later lead to an unbelievable story.

We got to Pizza e Birra, the venue of the press conference, at 12.05 PM while the invitation was at 12 sharp. However when we stepped inside, there were only about 4 people there and the backdrop was still being assembled. Half of the restaurant was occupied by patrons, eating their lunch, totally oblivious to the fact that I was about to have the most incredible experience.

They're just setting up the backdrop

So we were early, and it was fine by me because that gave me more time to compose myself. At that time I was already very nervous and it didn't help that I didn't get enough sleep and could only eat very little in the morning. At one point, I told my sister I felt like throwing up and falling asleep at the same time.

Then somebody from Ismaya Live came to us to say that the interview was going to be a group format, with 2 other journalists from different media. More and more people started arriving filling up all corners of the space allocated for the press conference. Still though, I expected more people to show up. Not that I was complaining, less people meant there was a bigger chance for me to maybe sneak an extra minute or two during the interview.

I spent some time going through my questions with my sister and checked my Twitter timeline. Speaking of which, there was like a sideline story involving Twitter. Apparently, my friends, (oh how I love them) who have been hearing me talking and tweeting endlessly about this day, couldn't help to feel excited for me. So they started giving me pep talks and well wishes since the night before and they really tuned in to my timeline to find out what was going on with my "Meeting Ben Folds" plan. Vanya and Tjetjep, even started a "hug campaign" the night before, where they tweeted Ben lots of times telling him that I was his biggest fan and that I should get a hug when I meet him. Those tweets got retweeted a few times by other people that I started to panic. Luckily they stopped before it got out of hand :D Anyway, on Thursday, a lot of them tweeted me asking for updates and wishing me luck. It even came from people whom I didn't even think would pay any attention to my crazy tweets at all! The whole thing was just so sweet. I felt somewhat less nervous knowing that my friends, especially the girls in the office, were cheering for me from in front of their computers/phones. Thank you guys!

I'm okay, I just wanna puke.

Anyway, after waiting for about an hour, suddenly, Ben showed up. He walked so nonchalantly that I almost didn't notice it was him. But I've seen his face so many times (on YouTube mostly haha) that I froze right away when I saw the top of his head from where I was sitting. I grabbed my sister's hand. "What??" she said, annoyed. "He's here!" I said, almost passed out from excitement.

And there he was. He looked exactly like I imagined him to look like, except whiter. I know that's a weird thing to say but that was my first impression. He was really fair and his hair was lighter in color than I thought. He came in with only 2 people. No entourage. No bodyguards. Nothing. He looked well rested and relaxed. He said hi to a few people in the room and the press conference started right away.

I tried taking lots of pictures but for some reason, the room suddenly got dark, even though there were huge glass windows on the side. So the camera wouldn't focus and I was too excited to change the setting. At one point, I noticed that he lifted up his BlackBerry towards us, (there were perhaps 10-15 of us standing right in front of him), took a snap and smiled. He answered some questions from the journalists politely, cracking a joke or two.

I couldn't remember much about this part of the day, it was sort of a blur because my head was screaming "Affi, Ben Folds is sitting less than a meter away from you! Would you believe this?" And I was trying to shut it up. Next thing I know, he was asked to stand in front of us so we could take better pictures. I took this chance to snap some more photos, which as you can see below, came out better.

I love the goofy look on his face in this picture

Then, the interview session began.

We were divided into several groups, each consisting of 3 journalists. My group got the second turn so I was waiting near the long table where the interview was conducted, trying to figure out which questions I was going to ask. You see, I prepared about 10 questions, but I realized that I wouldn't have enough time to ask them all so I knew I had to cut them half. I had to figure out which questions that were most likely will be asked by other people (so I wouldn't have to ask them again) and which would be most interesting for Cleo readers (had to stay professional even in the eye of madness). Before I was through figuring it out, they called our name.

Ben doing interview with the first group. I was up next.

And there I was, standing right in front of Ben Folds, the man whose music have become a part of my everyday life for the past few years, they might as well be the original soundtrack of it. We shook hands and we were told that we only had 10 minutes. My heart sank a little. 10 minutes meant that each of us could only ask 2 questions max. And Ben was such a great interviewee, he never answered questions in just 2-3 sentences. So by the time I finished my first question, and before it was my turn again, the MC reminded us that our time was up. I told her "I only got a chance to ask 1 question. Could I please ask one more?" but she said "Sorry, time's up." Ben then said "It's okay if they all ask another question each." :)

Unfortunately I can't reveal too much detail about the interview. You just have to wait until it shows up in Cleo magazine, which I think will be out end of June.

After the interview was done, I asked him if I could take a picture with him and he said "Sure!". So I stood next to him while my sister took the pictures with her fancy camera. I wanted to ask for another one using my own camera but the line of people waiting for their turn to talk to him was so long that we had to hurry up.

My sister and I went to a table nearby where we met one of my best friends, Ipong, for lunch. I couldn't focus on anything anymore. I was relieved that the interview was over but how could I think of anything else when Ben Folds was sitting two tables away? Then from the table I saw that he was signing some CD covers and then I thought "Oh no! I forgot to bring mine!"

And that story will be on my next post :) Thanks for reading, guys.