 "Photo: Daniela Trujillo/The Daily Texan")
Gaggles of prepubescent tweens held out their cell phones and cameras as they were ushered into a dimly lit room on the third floor of BookPeople on Lamar Boulevard on Saturday afternoon. A smiling Lauren Conrad, star of “Laguna Beach” and “The Hills,” waited in anticipation, six black Sharpie markers lined up next to her.
Right before the onslaught of hormonal, brace-faced girls waiting to get their copies of “LA Candy” signed, Conrad took her Wrigley’s Doublemint gum out of her mouth and placed it casually under the tab of her sugar-free Red Bull can.
“What kind of gum you got there, Lauren?” I asked, mostly for the sake of small talk.
“Um. I don’t know? Green gum?” she said, chuckling to herself in amusement.
I burst out in awkward laughter, but mostly because the tension in the room was thick. Cameras from competing newspapers snapped the glowing, tan vixen who has captivated the hearts of the MTV-VH1 generation with her brilliantly white smile, the pretty enunciation of her words, and her amazing ability to make any emotion into a facial mannerism.
“Pretty hot today, huh?” I asked a minute later.
“Yes, I knoooooow.” Her hair was slightly poofy, no doubt a result of the cruel Texas humidity.
Conrad posed for cameras with a copy of her new novel, “LA Candy,” which is loosely based on her life. A young aspiring starlet goes to Hollywood in search of fame, in a peculiar twist on the “coming-of-age” story. What’s strange is that the story is mostly nonfiction, because Lauren herself has lived much of her formative years in front of a glass lens. For a moment, right before the hundreds of adoring fans outside the room were let in, I relented against what I thought was sheer apathy for Lauren Conrad. I felt a little sad.
She sat back down in her plain brown chair, wearing a white dress from Barney’s and bright red nail polish on her perfectly manicured toes, and stretched her fingers out in a sort of pre-signing exercise. She was, maybe, nervous. Even after exposing the most intimate moments of her life to millions of viewers, this was a girl who could still get the shakes.
One by one, the fans trickled into the room to get their books signed; some cried, some trembled as they tried to get a clear shot of Conrad on their iPhones, some came bearing “blueberry muffins made from scratch” and University Co-op T-shirts.
One pair of besties said Conrad inspired them to go into fashion design. Conrad’s travails at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandise are chronicled heavily in “The Hills.”
“She inspired us to go to FIDM, and we both just got accepted,” said Samantha Stahl, a Lake Travis High School senior who claimed to be actor Nick Stahl’s cousin. “Look at me, I’m shaking!”
Conrad sighed in relief near the end of the book signing as the fans started to dwindle and dissipate.
She might be an inspiration or she might be a meme in today’s fast-paced society, but Lauren Conrad is, above all, something else: A human being.
