You may think of Kelly Clarkson as sweet and wholesome and adorable — and OK, 99.9 percent of the time, she definitely is. But she revealed to Ellen DeGeneres on Tuesday (and TODAY's Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb on Wednesday), that even she has a dark side.
DeGeneres asked Clarkson to open up and share something she'd never told anyone before, and in exchange the talk-show host would donate $10,000 to a breast cancer research charity. And boy did the singer have a doozy of a tale!
"I'm going straight to hell, I'm aware," she told DeGeneres. "It's the worst thing I've ever done."
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As Clarkson explained, she was waitressing in a comedy club and had been pestered over and over by one regular there to go out with him. Finally, she gave in. But as she noted, she didn't have a lot of dating experience.
"I was 18 and I'd literally been on two dates in my life," she said. "This was the second one."
There are two other things Clarkson said to preface to the story: She's about 5'3" and didn't mind that her date was about 5'2".
But he did. So they went to Bennigan's for dinner and "He proceeded to talk about his height for like a solid hour," she said. "I withstood an hour. And then I went to the bathroom ... and I left."
Yep! That's the horrible thing. Which, in the moment, was probably pretty horrible for her admirer.
"I'm short, so it didn't matter to me, but it mattered to him," she said. "I had a 'come-to-Jesus' [moment] in the bathroom and I was like, 'You will go out there, you will put your big girl panties on and just go out there and be a good person' and I chose to not be."
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As she said on TODAY, "It was bad, y'all! No one was there. You cannot judge me. ... I judge me."
Then she revealed there was even more to the story: she left the restaurant with no way of getting home and had to call a friend from a nearby gas station!
To be fair, she was working three jobs at the time and admitted to Ellen that she was "tired."
But at least she has the story to tell, and an apology. "If you're out there, I'm so sorry," she said. "I'm a horrible human."
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