I’ll be honest. I don’t get invited to a lot of rap guys’ parties. So I really didn’t know what to expect from Sean “Diddy” Combs’ Super Bowl Bash at Main Street Event Center on Thursday night. I knew Diddy was scheduled to arrive at 12:30 (in the a.m.) and I was to arrive between 9 and 10 pm to pick up my media credentials. I arrived at 9:20. Diddy arrived at, well, I’m not sure. I actually never saw him. My friends swear they caught a glimpse of his head sometime around 2 am, so I trust them. They’re honest folks. But never again will I trust a man with a microphone who yells out “Diddy is in the building!” every 15 minutes. That guy, I’m afraid, is a liar. Although I never saw Mr. Combs, I did see lots of other things in the five hours I spent playing Diddy or Didn’t He? Jump if you want to play, too.
Saw
A tweet from Diddy (@iamdiddy) at 8:30 saying he was on a jet to Dallas.
A big empty building. The Main Street venue (in the old Purgatory space) is huge, with three sprawling floors, so it was difficult to determine a head count for the most part, but at 10:30, there were only a handful of people there.
A tweet from Diddy at 11 saying he had landed in Dallas.
Red carpets. Celebrity arrivals were supposed to begin at 11, with appearances by the likes of Cedric the Entertainer, actress Regina King (227!), and a long list of NFL players. Soon, those red carpets were white with snow.
Lots of people standing around looking out windows. Couldn’t tell if they were looking for celebs or watching the snow fall.
Guys in black and yellow jackets handing out free CDs and Ciroc vodka towels. Also, large cardboard cutouts of Diddy Dirty Money (Diddy’s new group) and cardboard Ciroc bottles.
Chicken wing eating and open weed smoking. Around 1 am, we were ushered into a small-ish room on the third floor so that we could greet Diddy when he arrived. Besides the weed and wings, there were also dancing girls, both employees of the club and not, and general merrymaking.
Jermaine Dupri. Janet Jackson’s petite ex, was a special guest DJ. He appeared at around 1:20 or so wearing sunglasses and a heavy coat with a fur-lined hood, which he wore for the duration.
A tweet from Diddy a little before 2 saying he was on his way. At that point, microphone guy had already been repeating his “Diddy is in the building!” refrain. Told you. Liar.
Didn’t See
Diddy. When we asked one of his yellow-and-black-jacketed crew members if he was, in fact, in the building, the guy said, “He’s in and out.” Hmm. Maybe it was in, then out. We will never know.
We finally decided to call it a night at 2:30, but the wait for a cab was clocking in at two hours. So I did what anyone who thought they might die in a snowstorm outside a Diddy party would do: I put my free Ciroc towel on my head, trudged out into the blizzard, and stood by the road hoping like hell a cab would come. And it did. Turns out the driver, O’Daniel (that’s his first name, and no, he’s never been to Ireland), had just driven in from Houston to bring a guy to the Super Bowl (cost of that trip: $350 + gas). He didn’t know where he was, but he was happy to take us wherever we needed to go as long as we could direct him. O’Daniel, needless to say, got a nice tip and directions back to the highway.
