AVN and well, whatever …

Hey, I’m back from the Adult Entertainment Expo / AVN awards in Vegas..

It was okay..  I did this last year and took notes as to what i would do better if I  did it the next year.  Well I must’ve forgotten my notes because I made the same mistakes and more!

Geez, where to start?   Well of course I had a flurry of activity before leaving though I managed to get ” Glory Hole-elujah!” done but there were supposed to have gotten more shoots done before leaving.

While I could’ve just thrown a bunch of random outfits in a bag, an event is always a good opportunity to make a whole bunch of new costumes.   So I worked on two, with this blue and white thing as a potential for an outfit in case I attended the awards

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And then on  the last day before leaving, I whipped this one up, made partially out of a recycled prom dress and well, yards and yards of inch wide black elastic, I guess.  It didn’t come out half bad considering I whipped it up in hours and sorta winged it (winged it?  wang it?  wung it?)
And I shoved a whole bunch of other outfits in my bags and headed off to Vegas in rather a hurry.

So I get there and my troubles really began.  You see, I hadn’t used uber on my iphone in nearly a year, because well, I hadn’t traveled in nearly a year and I never use uber at home since I always have my own car.  Lo and behold I touch down in Vegas and uber is forcing me to upgrade to the newest version of their app, which doesn’t work on my iphone – period, which is stupid because it worked perfectly fine a year ago!! (You’d think it would be in their interests to allow an older version of the uber app to still work, but apparently that’s not important to them).

For the past few months a friend was supposed to gift me  their iphone 5 to replace my 4 but it never happened and instead another friend gave me a Samsung android phone instead, so I had brought it along just to familiarize myself with an android phone, but I had no idea I’d have to press it into service sooner than expected.

So I get to Vegas and I’m now forced to take taxis everywhere which sucks because 1:  they’re far more expensive than ubers, and 2: youre basically shit out of luck if you’re in a place where taxis don’t frequent.  And it turns out that I was in such a hurry to leave that I basically forgot a zillion things, most of which I could have gotten at a stupid ol’ dollar store.  So the first day in Vegas was spent just scurrying around getting those things.  And at one point I took a $15 taxi ride out to Home Depot (a mile and a half away) to get spray glue, because that’s the best thing to stick pasties on with, only to have to walk all the way back to the hotel because there was no way to hail a cab out there.

Oh and I recall someone once suggested not to waste my time getting my nails done before leaving, and just “do it in Vegas”.. Well, turned out I could never get an open slot at a nail salon there, and my time in Vegas was worth more than getting my nails done, so I never got a freakin’ manicure either!

In hindsight, I should have just rented a car, it would’ve cost me far less and given me the freedom to go anywhere I needed to go.  But of course, that didn’t dawn on me until it was nearly time to leave.

On Thursday after running all over town (who knew that you can’t buy stockings at Victoria’s Secret any more) I shot a scene with Kelli Lox and Christian XXX that we will see more of once I get the photos sent to me, so that’ll be another post.  For now, I can include a few behind the scenes selfies.

By the end of the day I got so frustrated with the phone situation, I basically paid some little hole-in-the-wall-shady-cel-phone-place-staffed-entirely-by-Asians to unlock the Samsung phone (it was on T-mobile and I’m AT&T) so by Friday I was able to use uber properly, and finally get my ass down to the convention floor.

I  started out wearing this little number until someone at the con warned me that pasties were not covering my boobs enough, even though I was walking across the hotel lobby and in the queue to get in just fine with them all out for the world to see.  Yeah, they wait until I get IN and NOW they tell me?  Of course, half the porn stars sitting at booths at the show are showing just as much as me, so I don’t know if it was just a problem someone had with me, but in any event I snapped a few shots of them, just in case I was warned again, i could just thumb through my phone and say “but did you tell HER to cover up?  double standards?”
So I got to the show sorta later than I wanted to (about 2 pm) and pretty much saw everything I wanted to see in about an hour.   I wasn’t even allowed to bring in a suitcase (last year they allowed it), so I had to check that at the hotel, and go back to it to change outfits, since they told me my tits couldn’t be out like that.  So I changed, into my Louis Vuitton counterfeit bag corset, which for me is pretty tepid.  And finally I saw something that piqued my interest.

There was one booth there, that had this thing that you walked into.  Its hard to describe it, but imagine something about the size of a TARDIS (well, the outside of one), and  you step in and it’s like maybe 200 camera and lights.  Then they take your picture and they can 3-d print a little statue of you! www.me-mento3d.com

So I see this and the guy running the booth, I guess knew who I was (because I actually got quite a few people recognizing me at the show), and was like “Tara, you gotta do this!  We can make you a statue and we can work out some sort of deal where you sell them to your fans”  (or something along those lines).  And I’m like “ooh, this is the coolest thing I’ve seen so far, but you haven’t exactly caught me at my best!”

So I do the math.  It’s 4 pm.   The convention floor is open till 8.  The uber ride back to the hotel is 10 mintues each way, half hour max.    Zip back, change into whatever is the most fabulous outfit I have, and get back here still in time to see whatever I missed.  I can totally swing it.  I had actually been pretty miserable on this trip up to this point, it was nice to get a mission.  Finally!  I had a mission!  I’d zip back change and get turned into an action figure!!

So that’s what I did.  I had brought along my “Fan Dancer” outfit but now with my new  boobs filling it out even nicer, and with pink hair too, I think it was a good choice for a little statue of me.  I have not heard back from them yet about it, but as soon as i do I’ll have an update on it, and how you can get a little Tara Emory statue!

The rest of the night was spent meeting some new faces in the trans porn and running into a few familiar faces, Natalie Mars, Isabella Sorrenti, Kelli Lox (we did a scene together with Christian but that will be another post), Tyra Scott, I saw Kylie Maria for a fleeting moment, and actually had a nice sit down with Gia Darling and we reminisced about the golden age on internet porn when making money off the internet was a helluva lot easier!

I’m always bumping into Morgan Bailey, Michelle Austin, Eddie Wood and I know there’s some names I’m forgetting, and if I didn’t include you I’m sorry.  I kinda didn’t have as much free time as I wanted to have.

So let’s see.  Backtracking a little bit, I shot a scene with Christian and Kelly Lox on Thursday afternoon, and a scene with just Christian on Saturday.  There had been a possibility of getting a paid gig on this trip, but it didn’t happen.  Because of that, I opted not to go to the awards show (it’s kinda pricey), and instead just hung about the convention and the circular bar at the Hard Rock during that time.

And yes, I was STILL working on outfits right up until the day of.  Yeah, I might have left a small mess on the floor…
And I think I can say that this one had maybe a teeny weeny bit of Vegas-period Elvis Presley in it, though it was completely unintentional.  But it was a happy accident, or maybe my brain was subliminally working on a different level.  I had wanted to add a white fur collar, but no fur was available (and I wasn’t going to cannibalize a coat for that), but it works fine with a fur coat over it.
And well, the last night was spent  at the TGirl night at the Las Vegas Lounge, and since I was flying out the next morning, there was no good reason to get super trashed or off on some Hangover movie style tangent.   I’m a little too sensible when it comes to things like that, I never ever party when I have to be all packed up and out of the room the next morning.

All in all, it was a pretty successful trip, though I feel I spent/wasted a lot of time finishing things that I was working on up until leaving, preventing me from maybe enjoying things that much.  Of course, it’s always on the last night that you’re in town that you meet a nice person who could have easily taken you all around town for your whole trip had you met them the minute you landed..  And had I gotten the paid shoot I would have been happy to have spent a little to go to the awards, but that’s fine, I created my own entertainment, and hey, I’m sorta circling around the perimeter of the whole porn business anyway, maybe next year I’ll finally do it right.

-Tara

PS   I’m leaving the shoots I did there for another post, as well as what’s happened since, because it’s been a rough few weeks since, oh…  January 20th or so… But I think you can guess what that’s about..