A woman said she was “appalled” after she and her friends were called out by Miranda Lambert on Saturday at the country singer’s Las Vegas show for taking a group photo.
Adela Calin said the country singer stopped midway through her performance of Tin Man, after spotting her and five of her friends posing for a photo.
WATCH THE VIDEO ABOVE: Country singer Miranda Lambert calls out audience members for taking a selfie.
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“It was 30 seconds at most,” Calin, a social media influencer from Las Vegas, said. “We took the picture quickly and were going to sit back down.”
A video clip of the moment went viral on TikTok, where many users came to Calin and her friends’ defence.
“I’m gonna stop right here for a sec,” Lambert is heard saying in the video, which has over 1.4 million views and 81,000 likes.
“These girls are worried about a selfie and not listening to the song, and it’s p****** me off a little bit.”
While the audience roared in support of Lambert during the video, many users on TikTok and Twitter said they felt Lambert’s reaction seemed harsh.
“She could have finished her song and just said some blanket statement like, ‘Let’s try to be in the moment and stay off our phones’ if she felt like she needed to,” one person commented on the TikTok video.
“This was completely uncalled for, and disrespectful to her fan base. They paid their money and (were) enjoying the music,” one user tweeted.
A representative for Lambert declined to comment.
Calin, 43, said she believes Lambert’s reaction might be due to the growing number of artists having things thrown at them onstage by overzealous fans.
Fans online have expressed safety concerns for touring artists, specifically female musicians, several of them pointing out that most of the viral videos involved women being struck.
Many have called on concertgoers to be respectful of the musicians they come to see, noting that many people forget that celebrities are also human.
While Calin understands the overall safety concerns for artists, she said she was disappointed by Lambert’s behaviour.
“It felt like I was back at school with the teacher scolding me for doing something wrong and telling me to sit down back in my place,” she said.
“I feel like she was determined to make us look like we were young, immature and vain. But we were just grown women in our 30s to 60s trying to take a picture.”
Calin said the group — which was sitting very close to the stage — had tried to take photos before the show started, but the lighting wasn’t great. So she asked the woman behind them to take a photo of her and her friends towards the end of the show.
“We just couldn’t get one good picture,” Calin said. “We were so excited because I think we had the best seats in the house in the whole theatre.”
She posted the photos to her Instagram on Monday, writing in the caption: “These are the two pictures we were (taking) when Miranda Lambert stopped her concert and told us to sit down and not take selfies.”
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