Local business presents at Urban Music Awards

“You need to be drunk when you present,” says someone in the crowd.

Another voice echoes, “That’s so urban.”

It’s hard for me to convince myself that just yesterday we were driving out of Indianapolis, grubby with bad breath and un-stretched legs. We, being myself and the staff of Splashtone.com, Indy’s own national online booking and event-planning Web site, which formed earlier this year.

With champagne pouring and cell phone cameras snapping, I feel like I’m tagging along with “the band” more than I feel like I’m sitting in on an important sponsorship prospect for a burgeoning, locally-owned business.

“It’s a big opportunity to get our name into the ears of other businesses in the music industry, and since we were taken on at the very last minute, we were able to do this in a price range we could handle,” says Colin Mathews, co-founder of Splashtone.com.

Right now, we’re in a white limo named Cloud on our way from New Jersey, where we’ve been staying at Bob Cowherd’s (Splashtone co-founder) dad’s house, to Manhattan, N.Y., where Mathews, along with hip-hop artist Capone, will co-present the award for Best New Artist at the Urban Music Awards.

Nobody really knows what to expect, but everyone has an idea. We’ve all seen these things on TV thousands of times — with the Oscars, the Grammys and the VMAs. So after years of watching famous, semi-famous and all the other pretty people from places that have coast affiliations present or win an award, everyone’s excited to be a part of the action.

Finally.

We are going to walk the red carpet, sit at a VIP sponsor table, see Boyz II Men, rub shoulders and network at the after-party.

Maybe it’s when the limo drops us off an hour ahead of schedule that things start to go wrong on the luckiest day of the year (July 7, 2007).

Then again, maybe it’s because the paparazzi isn’t immediately clamping down on their shutter buttons as we strut our designer clothes and impossibly high heels down the red carpet.

Oh wait, actually, I think it’s because the UMAs are officially two hours late, host Foxxy Brown is officially trashed to the point where she can’t keep a beat and has to be physically removed from the stage and, worst of all, Boyz II Men is officially not here.

This is urban? No. This is a disaster.

Fortunately, the Splashtone crew has the rare resiliency to take it all in stride. “A lot of Jordan’s [Kensington, of Invincible Media Group] plans obviously fell though; several of the people didn’t show up, and there wasn’t much of an apology,” Mathews says. “But we did learn invaluable lessons as to how these types of events work … Plus, it was a spontaneous road trip to New York!”