By Stone Martindale Dec 12, 2006, 2:33 GMT
Americans, already wringing their hands over Bush foreign policies tainting the perception of them overseas, now have actress Sharon Stone causing a bit of trouble.
Still gorgeous © Chris Hatcher / Photorazzi
Stone may have wanted to make a fashionable late entrance at a Norwegian banquet honoring the Nobel Peace Prize winners as host in Oslo, but she ended up "stepping in it" and made the country of Norway take notice.
Typical of Norwegians, Queen Sonja and King Harald were invited to the Nobel Banquet for the first time, and according to their punctual traditional ways arrived exactly on time.
Americans may or may not know this, but when it comes to royalty the titled are always the last to arrive anywhere. Protocol demands that guests are formally requested to be seated before the event begins.
Norway's Aftenposen.no.com reports that "Norway's King Harald V and Queen Sonja were invited to the annual Nobel Banquet at Oslo's Grand Hotel. The reason had a lot to do with royal etiquette as well: Norway's Nobel Committee has traditionally wanted to keep the Nobel Banquet relatively informal, so the royals haven't been invited. But this year, prize winner Muhammad Yunus had himself invited Spain's Queen Sophia as one of his guests."
Norwegians normally eschew the glitzy Royal "scene" and have been low key at past Nobel Prize events.
Host of the Nobel concert, Sharon Stone ended up arriving after the royals, Aftenposen.no.com reports that attendee Carl-Erik Grimstad, a former palace official who's now a political scientist at the University of Oslo, deemed it a "violation" of international custom.
"When the king is invited to such an event, guests need to have a very good reason for arriving after he does," Grimstad told newspaper Aftenposten. "I'm sure that if she didn't have a good reason, she'll be sorry about it. But when that's said, I would think the king will be fairly relaxed about her blunder."
Blogger Perez Hilton spilled the beans that Stone, on top of ruffling Nordic feathers, also was on a fur bender and was seen in fur, as well as buying furs.
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