New York Comes to Santa Barbara

Flavor Fav sent her away, and she landed at our doorstep. On Saturday, June 19, New York (Tiffany Pollard), the first lady of VH1, will be hosting an evening at Sandbar in Santa Barbara. Act quickly if you want to get a taste of some big apples, at least, the silicone kind.

New York, of course, is the nickname ordained by Flavor Flav, for whose affection she competed in the first two seasons of VH1’s Flavor of Love. She has been known to call herself HBIC (“Head Bitch In Charge”) and has since starred in four VH1 spinoff shows: I Love New York, I Love New York 2, New York Goes to Hollywood, and New York Goes to Work. She is currently working on her film career.

New York (and her bodyguard) will be delivered to Santa Barbara by limo only for the evening before returning home to Los Angeles. I spoke with Johnny Bacon, Sandbar’s newly minted director of marketing, who talked about his vision of bringing Vegas to Santa Barbara.

“[Celebrity appearances] create an exciting adrenaline rush … Everyone’s saying ‘Oh my god, New York is coming to Santa Barbara. The lovers and the haters will all be there,” says Bacon. This could perhaps indicate a nascent trend of booking celebrity appearances in Santa Barbara’s Lower State nightclubs.

Bacon recalls that he has been working in the nightclub industry since he was legally able, spending the past few years booking celebrity appearances in Vegas clubs and working extensively with a coterie of MTV and VH1 starlets.

Available talent is delimited by a budget (which due to contractual reasons cannot be disclosed), and what we might call, the excitement factor of a given celebrity—reality TV stars and tabloid mongerers, people whose public persona is foremost defined by their vivid personal life. Bacon was unable to divulge who will next be appearing in Santa Barbara, but there will certainly be more to come.