Interviewing pop stars isn’t exactly something new for me. I’ve met Beyonce and Fergie in the past and managed to keep my cool. But I was totally starstruck by Mandy Moore at the LaSalle Power Co. last night. Mandy was in town to perform a private concert won by Chicagoan Stephanie Durant through ilovegain.com. (The show was sponsored by the laundry detergent, and I’m pretty sure Mandy was contracted to announce during the concert that she’s a “Gainiac,” whatever that means). During the red carpet interviews before the show, an editor for CS was talking to Mandy and I was next in line. He asked her what she and husband Ryan Adams like to do to relax, but her handler didn’t like that question, and forced her to wrap up the interview then whisked her right past me. Since I didn’t get to interview her on the red carpet, I was invited to talk to her for a couple of minutes inside the club. As I followed her up the stairs, she was talking to her handler, saying she felt bad that he cut off the CS reporter and wanted to find him so he could ask her another question.

And that’s when I got a little starstruck. Mandy just seemed really cool and she’s so pretty, that I kind of just wanted to skip the interview and try to become friends with her instead. But I had a job to do, so I took this quick video where I basically forgot all the questions I intended to ask and just said random things to Mandy Moore—including asking her to say ‘hi’ to a former TOC employee who’s a huge Mandy Moore fan. Mandy was very tolerant and super nice the whole time, as you can see in the video below.

As for the concert, she focused mostly on songs from her new album, Amanda Leigh. Here’s a clip of her performing “I Can Break Your Heart Any Day of the Week,” with the contest winner. She closed out the night with a reworked version of her first hit, “Candy.”