CONTINUING our day in the life features which have taught us that Naomi Campbell likes Galaxy bars and a clean colon and that Kim Kardashian’s executive assistant would take a bullet for her, allow Sleb Safari to introduce you to one of Beyoncé’s backing dancers.
Ashley Everett is Beyoncé’s dance captain and one of the Single Ladies dancers. Basically, she’s living the life you wish you had.
When you’re sitting at your desk with the day stretching interminably ahead she’s zhushing her hair before strutting on to the stage at Madison Square Garden beside Be-flipping-yoncé.
Beyoncé runs a tight ship with no leaks. This lady has twice released a surprise album with a video for every song already prepared without anyone even knowing she was working on new material.
Ashley tells Refinery 29 how Beyoncé manages to keep everything locked down and it’s extreme.
When they were filming some of the videos for last year’s top-secret Lemonade album the dancers worked without music and moved to beats.
On other videos they danced to a distorted version of the song and sometimes there was no music at all, just commands such as ‘be serious’ and ‘intense and angry’. How very Zoolander.
"We usually know when something's coming, but with the Beyoncé album, I didn't know it was dropping until the night that it dropped,” Ashley scene sets.
“We had just done a show and got on the tour bus and everyone's phones were blowing up, like, 'Why didn't you tell me the album was coming out?' And I was just like, ‘Whoa, wait. What are you talking about? It came out? We can talk about it now? Great. I'm in eight videos!' So yea, we get surprised, too.
“Even like when we did the Superbowl and performed Formation – that was a whole new song that no-one had heard. And then right after that she announced the Formation tour. And we were like, 'OK, cool. So there is going to be a tour.' Because we didn't know, for real!"
Ashley also talks about being “fluent in this Beyoncé language" which Sleb Safari hopes is a series of clicks and whistles ‘spoken’ only by a dozen people who were drilled in it in a training facility deep underground.
Disappointingly it seems that everyone on Beyoncé’s payroll works really, really hard. Sleb Safari’s bubble has been burst.
“People on the team will go days without sleeping. Dancers, too. But she's not sleeping, either. Everybody is working so hard. That Beyoncé album, when we shot all those videos secretly, we were on tour when we shot those videos so on days off, we would fly from South America to Houston, shoot a video, fly back, do a show. No sleep. No rest. Days are just going into one another.
“People think it's glitz and glamour and private jets. We have moments like that, yes, but a lot of the time we're over here looking like death, just trying to survive. She be working hard, we all do... But we do it because we love it, because we believe in it, in her."
And there you have it. “Looking like death, just trying to survive” is how hard you have to work to be Beyoncé. Puts your own life into perspective, doesn’t it?
The Osbournes have a very small, very intimite wedding vow renewal ceremony
WARMEST wishes to Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne who have weathered the storm of his infidelity and renewed their wedding vows.
The ceremony took place in a Las Vegas hotel and was so private that the couple’s three children weren’t even told of it.
“It was just for us. I didn’t want lots of people there making it into a big old party,” Sharon explained.
And if you want to read any more about this intimate wedding Hello! has dedicated seven pages to it.
The Clooney twins have arrived
Congratulations twice over to Amal and George Clooney who have welcomed twins into the world.
Ella and Alexander were born last week and both are doing well, according to the couple’s rep.
George, however, “is sedated and should recover in a few days”.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the many, many reasons we love George Clooney.
What were you thinking Oprah?
Embarrassment for Oprah recently when she picked up her phone after tending to her herb garden and posed the question on Instagram: “What to do with all this dill?”
Quick as a flash Jamie Oliver weighed in, but not with a 15-minute meal recipe.
“That’s fennel, mate,” he pointed out.
To be fair, the two plants look alike and it was an easy fennel faux pas to make.
Sleb Safari is curious why Oprah would pick quite so much fennel/dill in one go when she wasn’t sure what to do with it. Really, was that sage?
Thank you, thank you for groaning at Sleb Safari’s terrible attempt at a joke.
