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Is there any celebrity who is as beloved as Keanu Reeves? Besides Dolly Parton? I don’t think so. Whenever Keanu is in the news I know it’s going to be for something good. And how blessed we are to have not one but two Keanu stories today. The first is that he performed with his band Dogstar for the first time in twenty years. I am a young-ish millennial so I did not know about Dogstar, it was before my time. It was a band Keanu was part of from 1991 until about 2002, but it was always overshadowed by Keanu’s acting projects. The band reunited at BottleRock festival in Napa and sounded pretty good!
Keanu Reeves… played bass with his old rock band Dogstar in its first public concert in more than 20 years Saturday at the BottleRock Napa Valley festival in Napa California, Deadline reported.
Dogstar never really hit it big, but with the “Matrix” star providing the celebrity power, thousands watched him with bandmates Bret Domrose, the lead singer, and drummer Robert Mailhouse.
Reeves jumped for joy as the the band began its set in video shared by the San Francisco Chronicle’s Mariecar Mendoza.
“We were hoping we wouldn’t see a lot of grass. This is awesome,” Domrose told the crowd, SF Gate reported.
Screams of “We love you, Keanu!” accompanied every number, according to SFGate. Reeves said about as much as he did in the recent blockbuster “John Wick: Chapter 4,” but he allowed afterward that he was nervous. He credited Mailhouse with easing his stage jitters.
“He was just super positive,” Reeves told The San Francisco Chronicle. “He was like, ‘Listen to the music. Just be present in the song, and it will go from there.’”
There are some videos embedded in that article that show Keanu playing the bass and it’s distracting how hot he is. I am also distracted by the fact that he is wearing orange pants that perfectly match his bass guitar. But he’s better than I expected! What I always notice about Keanu as a performer is his stillness and poise. He makes things seem effortless. That’s why it surprised me to read that he was nervous and needed support from his band mate, because he doesn’t look nervous at all. Then again, twenty years between performances is a long time. Of course I’m sure a lot of people were there just to see him–if I had known he was performing in person on the same coast as me, I would have bought festival tickets and a plane ticket months ago.
The second story comes to us courtesy of Kate Beckinsale’s Instagram. She posted a throwback photo from her first time at the Cannes Film Festival thirty years ago. Back then she was starring in Much Ado About Nothing with Keanu, Denzel Washington, and Robert Sean Leonard. The story behind the photo is a sweet one: Keanu and Robert were helping her hide a wardrobe malfunction on the biggest night of her career.
“I had bought the bodysuit in the Sock Shop at the airport,” she explained, “and when I got in the car to drive to the premiere with Denzel and Pauletta Washington, all the poppers in the crotch popped themselves open and it flipped up like a roller blind.”
Beckinsale, 49, “didn’t feel it was appropriate to go delving around in [her] undercarriage” to clip her bodysuit back together, so she “just quietly panicked.”
Upon exiting the vehicle and stepping out “onto the biggest red carpet of [her] life,” the “Pearl Harbor” star “whispered to Keanu and Robert Sean Leonard what had happened.”
“In this picture I am holding the front gusset down and the two of them are holding the back gusset,” she shared, referring to the reinforced piece of fabric sewn into a garment.
Beckinsale went on to call the actors “absolute legends who may not even have fully understood the physics of what was happening or even heard the word ‘gusset’ before.
“But both jumped in to save me no questions asked x.”
I tried to find more photos from that night to get a better sense of Kate’s outfit. I think she was wearing a bodysuit under a skirt or a dress and it was riding up at her waist? Either way, of course Keanu would do the gentlemanly thing and help her out. That’s what Keanu does. He is, by all accounts, one of the good ones. I would have had no idea, looking at the photo, that anything was amiss. Everyone looks so young and carefree. Keanu and Kate are both beaming at Denzel Washington–I wonder if he had any inkling of what was going on. Did they have to move across the red carpet like, that, as a unit? That makes me think of the famous scene in Bringing Up Baby where Cary Grant’s character accidentally tears the back of Katharine Hepburn’s dress off. He has to awkwardly walk behind her with his arm around her waist to protect her modesty while she tries (and fails) to keep the panic out of her face. It’s a hilarious scene. Also, how different was the red carpet in 1993? No actress at Cannes today would have bought part of their red carpet ensemble at a sock store at the airport. Things are so much fancier now.
