Jennifer Lopez in Las Vegas

It looked like 2013 was shaping up to be a pretty spectacular — if a little odd —  year. I’d already been out to California in April for the unveiling of the utterly forgettable Facebook phone and breathe the same air as Mark Zuckerberg. May took us back to Las Vegas, just a few months after we’d been there for the annual CES show.

This was back in the days of CTIA. Whereas CES is a trade show for all things consumer electronics, CTIA was an event put on by the wireless industry itself. Think phones and the carriers and the like.

It wasn’t uncommon for someone to put on a press conference but not tell us what it was about. We usually could sort of figure it out — new hardware from the hardware companies, or from the carriers themselves, given how close those relationships were back then. Every now and then, though, we’d go in blind.

I remember that being the case for a Verizon presser. You line up, you shuffle in, jostling with your colleagues from other publications for good seats. And then you see what you get.

I wasn’t expecting Jennifer Lopez. Or maybe I was — I can’t recall if the press release announcing the press release (that’s a thing that happens far too often) said she’d be appearing. In all likelihood that was the case. But that’d have only made the even more confusing. JLo doing a phone? 

Nope. Turns out it was a partnership between Verizon and some Latino-focused mini-carriers. (MVNOs, they’re called.) Service and stores, aimed at New York, Los Angeles and Miami. That partnership didn’t last all that long.

But it did result in my getting some great shots of one of the biggest stars of the late 1990s and aughts. Whereas seeing Zuckerberg on stage just a month before felt pretty familiar — tech CEOs are tech CEOs, even when they’re the Facebook CEO — Jennifer Lopez was different. First is that you use both names if you’re using more than three letters. 

This was in JLo’s American Idol era. And I’m not ashamed to say she was a presence in the room. While her one job that day was to stand a the lectern and read off a teleprompter, I can recall her straining to actually see the words. That didn’t change the fact that this mega-star was standing in front of a bunch of tech journalists for (let’s be honest here) a reason many of us didn’t care all that much about.

And it led to few of my best celebrity pics at that point. I wouldn’t have to wait long for more.