Daily Intel’s love of Gossip Girl, the most awesomely awesome show ever, is nothing if not devotional, and this weekend we trekked all the way to (horrors!) Bridgehampton for the show’s season-two launch party, hosted by Vitaminwater. Chace Crawford, Leighton Meester, and Penn Badgley, we’re happy to report, are still as flawless as ever (though Chace was wearing so much bronzer we were initially worried he’d just walked through a dust storm). Ed Westwick, on the other hand, seems to have realized he’s now famous enough that he can stop feigning humility. (The reporter in us found his one-word answers infuriating; the female in us found the bad-boy ‘tude more than a little hot.)
And then, of course, there’s Blake Lively. Blake, Blake, Blake. We really want to like the girl for the sake of Penn, whom she’s dating and whose taste we imagine to be impeccable, but after about a minute in her presence we totally understood where America Ferrera’s eye-rolling comes from.
Blake’s late arrival on the red carpet sent a flurry of publicists running off in all directions to gather the rest of the cast for a group photo. After some to-do, they all gathered in front of a wall covered in bottles of actual Vitaminwater — but then there was an emergency. Blake sprinted to her publicist, who was standing beside us. “Is there something in my teeth?” she panicked. “Someone said there’s something stuck in my teeth.” She flashed an impossibly white grin. We saw nothing. She started picking at her teeth. A flashbulb went off nearby. “Oh, you can’t take my picture when I’m picking my teeth! It’s not fair!” she protested, smiling and pouting until the unsuspecting (mortified) fan offered to erase all pictures of Blake off his camera.
Then suddenly she was turning toward us, and talking to us. “Do you have a piece of paper?” Huh? What? “Do you have a piece of paper,” she repeated, not so much asking as demanding. We looked down at our reporter’s notebook. “No, not that piece of paper. I need a clean piece of paper to pick my teeth with.” Yes, ma’am! We frantically flipped pages and ripped one out. Blake folded it, then turned around. “Hide me! Hide me!” Blake cried to her publicist, who sheltered the star with her body as she started to pick. Down the carpet, the cast was still waiting for their photo op. Another member of Blake’s team, having heard of the disaster, rushed over and whipped out some floss from her bag. Blake tried that, too.
The entire teeth-picking fiasco took somewhere in the range of three to five minutes to resolve. Having apparently removed the offending food particle, Blake joined the group, but not before pulling several of them aside to double-check her teeth, just in case. Reassured, she tousled her hair, wrapped her arm around Penn Badgley, and flashed a perfect smile. Then, seconds later, Ed Westwick (or some other wonderful soul) bumped into the wall of Vitaminwater, sending bottles tumbling down and exploding upon the well-manicured feet of the entire cast. It wasn’t much, but when Blake’s publicist later restricted our interview to one question, despite our key role in Blake’s crisis intervention, it did start to feel like poetic justice.
