22 Things That Definitely Happen at a Stop on Lady Gaga's Dive Bar Tour

POPSUGAR Photography | Ryan Roschke
POPSUGAR Photography | Ryan Roschke

On Thursday, Lady Gaga ended her three-stop dive bar tour at a small venue called The Satellite in LA. The show came one week after her emotional NYC concert at The Bitter End. Each of the three stops was cloaked in secrecy: locations and times were kept under wraps, and the small buildings would only house so many people. Even the means of getting tickets were hazy at best. But once the show went live and the livestreams kicked in, social media blazed and Joanne took the stage to sing. POPSUGAR was lucky enough to secure a coveted invitation to the final stop on Gaga's tour. With so few people on the inside, we're painting an up-close picture of the event with our the most poignant moments.

  1. You stand in line at a hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant right next to the venue where everyone must check in.
  2. Hundreds of fans hopelessly wait outside and shoot disdainful glares that burn into the back of your head as you walk past all the security and staff and into the venue.
  3. Lady Gaga's former back-up dancer, Mark Kanemura, waits in line with the rest of the night's guests. You instantly recognize him from the videos for "Alejandro," "Judas," and "Marry the Night" and that iconic "Paparazzi" performance at the MTV VMAs, which, in your opinion, is one of the best VMAs performances in history.
  4. Brie Larson stands with a Bud Light, most likely waiting for her fiancé to come back from the bathroom.
  5. Tom Daley and Dustin Lance Black attend.
  6. Waitresses carry buckets of free, ice-cold Bud Light and only free, ice-cold Bud Light.
  7. A very insistent woman pushes to the front and says, "MY NEPHEW IS WORKING THE EVENT, I WANT TO SAY HI," and then just stands there, waiting for Lady Gaga to walk in.
  8. One audience member right at the front of the stage takes deep breaths to calm herself down.
  9. Another woman tries to push her way to the stage, only to get straight-up eviscerated by a security guard until she's forced to storm away, furious.
  10. RuPaul casually leans on a wall and surveys the crowd.
  11. A whole wardrobe's worth of costume changes arrives, and the crew sets it gingerly on the side of the stage for easy access.
  12. Ashlee Simpson stands right behind you (although you don't even notice until your single-serving friend for the night, another member of the press, tells you she was there).
  13. Lady "Joanne" Gaga sashays through the doors of this tiny bar in Silverlake like she's about to give the Broadway performance of a lifetime, belting "Come to Mama" while greeting the crowd.
  14. AND she wears matching pink leather jackets with her back-up dancers, and a fringed pair of those denim shorts she's been wearing lately, and her iconic hat, and a crazy sequin bra, and hair down to her ass with flowers in it like she's some sort of goddess that's descended just in time to give you all the life you could possibly want or need.
  15. A girl directly in front of you seems keen on jumping up and down in a very small, very crowded venue, landing on your feet more often than she's landing on the ground.
  16. You manage to take one perfect picture out of about 50 or 60, so you can post it on social media as a humblebrag.
POPSUGAR Photography | Ryan Roschke
  1. A moment before "Joanne," she speaks about album's titular song and her late aunt. She tells the audience that she might never have met her real father, because the death of his young sister had changed him in some indescribable and irrevocable way, and she would never truly know what he was like before that happened. She offers her own explanation of how grief and trauma can change a person. How there's the version of you that existed before something terrible happened, and the version of you that managed to crawl from the carnage. You afford yourself a brief moment of introspection, but snap back into the venue, the show, the song, and the Gaga when she sings, "Take my hand . . . "
  2. A very intense man in a pastel-pink Joanne hat cries and sings at the top of his lungs.
  3. For a brief moment, Gaga sits on a ledge on the stage and puts her head in her hands, and you wonder what she must be thinking. How hard it must be to share your art with the world, and to love creating it, and to love sharing it, and to love your fans. How hard it must be to face harsh critics who seem to take the work at face value, who expect you to do the same thing over and over again, who just compare your work to all the other work out there in the world.
  4. A moment of pure impulse: she grabs a Bud Light from the crowd and straight-up pours it on her head and soaks her shirt.
  5. Lady Gaga throws herself into a sudden stage dive, and a small realization dawns on you: maybe Gaga really hasn't changed at all since her days of performing at open mics in dive bars on gritty New York side streets. Maybe everything around her has changed, but she's still that same girl with big dreams who, at one point, wasn't sure anyone would even remember her name.
  6. Lady Gaga leaves the stage after a literal mic-drop.