A Prospect Heights bodega that found itself on the sidelines of the red carpet for the MTV Video Music Awards last Sunday is now trying to pawn a piece of the action.
Dubai Mini Mart is just steps away from the Barclays Center and on Sunday it served as an unwitting backdrop to the star-studded event. The bodega’s owners got their hands on a large swatch of the pop star–trodden floor mat and they are confident some super-fan out there will pay top dollar for a piece of it.
“Someone who is a big fan of Lady Gaga or Katy Perry would definitely want this,” said Abdul Ibrahim, a manager at the bodega on Dean Street at Sixth Avenue.
For now, the shopkeepers are keeping the 12-feet-by-12-feet stretch of carpet rolled up next to the plantain chips, but they are selling it on Ebay, where the bidding starts at $500. Celebrity-crazed shoppers who cannot bear the suspense of a bidding war also have the option to “buy it now” for a cool $5,000. Would-be owners should move quickly, though, because the auction ends on Monday.
Ibrahim said that 24-hour bodega’s employees befriended members of the awards show set-up crew in the days leading up to the massive event by letting them use the bathroom and chatting over egg and cheese sandwiches. The two-hour red carpet session jammed Sixth Avenue with celebrities and the screaming fans who love them. But once the blowout got going inside the Barclays Center, it was time to break down the outdoor set and, when Dubai proprietors asked on a whim for a section of the crimson ground covering, the MTV grunts obliged.
Whether anyone is willing to cough up $500 for a fuzzy piece of fabric that Miley Cyrus may or may not have walked on remains to be seen. As of Friday morning, no one had bid on the collector’s item, something one Brooklyn resident said had more to do with what MTV represents than the difficulty potential buyers face in storing the bulky bundle.
“[The red carpet is] from a network designed to destroy individuality and the celebration of the common man,” Park Sloper Anthony Lombardi said, adding that he would not spend a dime on it.
The owner of the bodega is not worried, though. He said that if no one purchases the rug then he will use it to carpet his basement, according to Ibrahim.
The red carpet is a long-standing show-biz tradition with a sinister history. The exact origin is unclear, but it was a tradition in ancient Greece to lay out a dyed carpet to honor the gods and, in the 5th-century B.C. play “Agamemnon,” the titular character’s wife rolls one out to welcome home her philandering husband — just before she kills him.
