We’ll leave it up to you, dear readers, to decide which word best describes the actions of West Hollywood’s City Council members on Halloween night. The council members should have spent the entire evening among the crowds on Santa Monica Boulevard celebrating the biggest festival of the year (one which the city spends nearly $900,000 of our money to stage). Instead they slipped out of West Hollywood early to kiss the ring of a celebrity at a nightclub in Los Angeles known for its celebrity crowd.
At Greystone Manor, Mayor Jeffrey Prang crowned Rihanna the Queen of West Hollywood and presented her with the key to the city. Grinning like school children, other council members posed for photos with Rihanna, with John Duran outdoing his peers with a bow.
Giving one of the world’s best-known singers an award would make sense if the council had used the occasion to promote our city and let West Hollywood in on it. But the entire presentation was a secret to the city and its residents until the next morning, when a celebrity gossip website posted news of it. The city then posted the photos on its site. So why wasn’t this staged on Santa Monica Boulevard for the benefit of the Halloween crowds? Why weren’t the local media and West Hollywood residents alerted about this event so they could attend? Why hasn’t the city tried to make some hay out of an award given to such a prominent celebrity, other than posting it on its own rarely watched web TV site? Before she hung up the phone in a huff, the city’s generally uncommunicative public relations officer, Tamara White, said they didn’t want a crowd there for “security reasons.”
All of which leads us to wonder, was Rihanna honored by the council to somehow benefit the City of West Hollywood? Or was she secretly given this odd award so the council members could fill their celebrity chaser fantasies? We think the answer, sadly, is obvious.
Silly? Embarrassing? Childish? Which words do you think apply?
Related content:
10 Photos of Giddy WeHo Councilmembers Worshipping Rihanna
Rihanna: Another WeHo Queen (This One for a Day)
i think the word ‘puzzling’ would apply?