Fan Fare

Gaga keeps her “little monsters” screaming, but what’s next?

Lady Gaga’s fans, whom she often refers to as her “little monsters,” were out in force this week in her hometown of New York City.  She enjoyed three sold out concerts and morning chat show “Today” said they had their largest crowd ever with up to 18,000 fans outside their Rockefeller Plaza studios for a performance on Friday morning.

On her second concert tour performing songs from two albums — “The Fame” and “The Fame Monster” — Gaga surely knows the money in music these days generally comes more from concert touring than album sales. On “Today,” she connected  directly to her fans, from the “freaks” to the “New York City gay kids,” telling them: “you can be whoever you want to be,  my little monsters.”

But even though her shows clearly are drawn from pop predecessors Madonna and Michael Jackson, Gaga showed off a rousing rendition of her new ballad “You and I” that recalled her old days as Stefani Germanotta, singing in New York’s burlesque bars. The performance seemed a bit distant from the outlandish, blood soaked Gaga of recent past. (Although, that said, she did bang on the piano in barely nothing and ended up hanging upside down from the piano stool, hardly a piano bar staple)

Yet, while pop stars are always redefining themselves, it seems hard to imagine that on her next album Gaga will stray too far from her glam formula. Recently ranked no. 4 on the Forbes top 100 power celebrity list,  Gaga was reported to have earned an estimated $31 million in 2009 from a 106-date tour that grossed $95 million.

Carrie Prejean calls sex video a solo “mistake”

Beauty queen Carrie Prejean, the former Miss California who became the darling of conservatives when she spoke out against gay marriage at this year’s Miss USA pageant, has another work getting her plenty of attention. No, it’s not her memoir, the defiantly titled “Still Standing,” that has people talking. It’s a sex tape that few have seen, but that plenty of people are jabbering about.

On Tuesday, Prejean herself went on television news shows and talked about the sex tape. In this interview with NBC’s “Today” show, Prejean defended herself and said that “nothing is private anymore.”

“Weatherman” Al Roker, Speidi wage war of words

Heidi and Spencer Pratt are making the most of their brief appearance on NBC’s jungle spectacle show “I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here,” which features B-list stars like the Pratts, dubbed “Speidi” in the media, competing in challenges such as eating bugs in the jungles of Costa Rica. Speidi quit the show a little over a week ago, then begged to get back on, then created even more drama when Heidi had to be rushed to a hospital. On Monday, the reality TV stars appeared for an interview on NBC morning news show “Today” and were questioned by weather anchor Al Roker. It’s not the first time that Roker has done an interview, but it seems Speidi thought they would be interviewed by “Today” host Matt Lauer. Apparently the celebrity couple was not amused by the whole thing because they later accused Roker of being too harsh. Some of Roker’s most pointed questions came when he asked Spencer about his style of acting like the villain on reality television. “When you say villain some people say jerk,” Roker said, equating the two. Spencer responded in a way that made one think he thought the two were the same. Afterward, Heidi Pratt told broadcaster Ryan Seacrest on his Los Angeles-based radio show that she was “shocked at how rude” Roker was. “I was crying afterward because I couldn’t believe I felt personally attacked.” Spencer added, “We were thrown off that the weatherman was trying to talk to Speidi,” and they way he said “weatherman” made it sound like a low-level job.