New York, March 9, 2007 – We headed over to Manhattan’s meatpacking district on Friday afternoon, and when we arrived at the Hotel Gansevoort where Beyonce was shooting a Samsung commercial, there was a big commotion across the street at Pastis. It turned out that Lindsay Lohan was having lunch there! And while the Samsung folks weren’t exactly thrilled to have paparazzi filming their filming, they must have been at least a little disappointed to have Lindsay Lohan steal their megastar’s thunder.

But not to worry; it wasn’t too long before Lohan left the restaurant and hopped into her car and drove off, and we turned our attention back to Beyonce. For a little while, anyway. After several takes in which the black-clad Grammy winner walked out of the hotel’s front doors while talking on her (presumably) Samsung cell phone, she had just reentered the lobby when a couple of fire engines, sirens blaring, came racing up the street and stopped right in front of the Gansevoort. It seems that they’d received a report of smoke in one of the rooms; firefighters walked right through the film set, moving everything along the way.

Beyonce stood inside the hotel lobby and chatted a bit with the firefighters, and then, having changed into a white t-shirt and jeans for a new scene, she walked to an adjacent restaurant, where she waited inside for fifteen minutes or so until the Fire Dept. gave the all-clear signal. The commercial crew put the set back together, and began shooting again, with the skimpily attired Beyonce jumping around to stay warm between takes.