One of Hollywood's main functions is to take regular people-- politicians, criminals, alien hunters-- and fabulize them until they become something you'd actually be willing to look at for 2 hours. In Cameron Crowe's 2000 film, Almost Famous, Kate Hudson plays a groupie, Penny Lane, like a sexy, effervescent sprite, as she dashes carelessly in and out of musician's hotel rooms and private jets. Her whole life seems very glamorous and exciting until the tour begins nearing New York where the band's wives await and Hudson is suddenly treated like a commodity, at one point bet by a band member in a poker game against 50 dollars and a pack of beer. In this way, the film somewhat touches upon the grim realities of groupiedom. It is, however, a Hollywood production, and thus Hudson never for a moment loses her glamour, morality, or desirability.

Fooled by the powers that be, I approached this piece as another fashion segment on the style of what I believed to be the ever-fabulous rock goddesses. Yet, in watching clips of the actual real-life groupies, I found that I was myself experiencing pity more than inspiration. Unlike the dancers and artists and musicians who constantly exude this aura of of glamour, excess, and fantasy, these women, with bleached blond hair and bulletin boards filled with collected memorabilia, were all too obviously real people, swallowed up into rock fantasy and consequently unrepentantly spit back out. Vince Neal, a member of Motley Crue, commented on groupies in "Behind Stage Doors: The Groupie Story:" 

"They just want to fuck your brains out, that's what they're there for. You get off stage, and they're ready to rock."

The musicians don't really have sex with the girls themselves; groupies function like nothing more than the reflective windows of the rock star's limos; they use these dolled-up small-town honeys and their adoration for the band to make love to themselves.