The One when We Tried to Win Tickets to the Grammys

It all started with a tweet.

TheEllenShow - Who wants to go to @theGRAMMYs? If you raised your hand and live near L.A. Live, make sure you pay attention to my tweets tomorrow.

How cool would it be to go to the Grammys? Supa cool. That's how cool. Thanks to Veronica who has been following Ellen for awhile and informed me of this incredible possible opportunity.

Thursday morning came and so did this tweet:

TheEllenShow - If you're in the Los Angeles area, make sure you're following my tweets. There's a big prize at stake. #theGRAMMYs

Yes, we live in LA, check, now what? Where do we go? What do we do to win?

We packed up the kiddos and headed down to LA Live to see if we could spot any crowds of any sort.

We ended up at the Nokia theater, a logical place to go to win tickets to the Grammys no? (Cuz that's where the Grammys take place.)

We noticed gates were set up and a few guards patrolling the area so we asked one of them what he knew.

Indeed, there was an event starting at noon for the Ellen Degeneres Show. Yes! We were in the right place! But it was only 9:30am so we had quite a wait in front of us. Meanwhile Fox decided to have a blowout. Oh boy. Good thing I had backup clothes for him! I know better now.

Around 11:00am Ellen tweeted again:

TheEllenShow - Live near L.A? Love music? Wanna go to @theGrammys? Head over to Nokia Plaza @LA_Live across from the Staples Center. You may be glad ya did.

Sweet! Already there! Hurry it up! I wanna win!

And then Ellen tweeted a little tweet that broke our spirits and dashed our hopes to shreads:

TheEllenShow - Okay L.A! Dress up like your favorite musician, past or present, & get down to Nokia Plaza @LA_Live across from Staples Center. Be creative.

SAY WHAT!!???!?!? We didn't know we were supposed to dress up! We assumed there'd be some sort of contest. But to have the costume tweet come after the location tweet, that's a li'l unfair in my humble opinion.

More and more people started showing up and so did staff members.

We asked them when this thing was really gonna get started and they said 3pm. It was only noon. We'd already been there since 9:30am, the kids were tired and hungry, and we were costumeless. So we called it quits. It was so hard to walk away when they started bringing out the flat screen TVs and PS3s and cameras and sound systems which I can only assume they were going to give away.

We would have been front and center on camera too cuz we were there first!

Oh well, bye bye Grammys, maybe next year.

Moral of the story: always have a cool costume on hand. In fact, just leave it in the trunk for when opportunities such as this arise as they often do in crazy LA :)

PS - Here's the winner of the Grammy tix:

TheEllenShow - Thanks, Los Angeles followers, for showing up dressed like your favorite musician. Check out who won tix to @theGrammys http://bit.ly/eW5XLh