Britney Spears on terrifying moment with snake during iconic performance
Entertainment
The plan was for me to use a snake as a prop
(Web Desk) - In an exclusive excerpt from her upcoming memoir 'The Woman in Me,' the pop icon writes about how her legendary MTV performance was “even more terrifying than it appeared”
In an excerpt shared with PEOPLE from her upcoming memoir, The Woman in Me, Spears, 41, writes about one of her most legendary live moments: when she performed “I’m a Slave 4 U” with an albino Burmese python named Banana wrapped around her shoulders at the MTV Video Music Awards.
“The plan was for me to sing ‘I’m a Slave 4 U,’ and we decided I would use a snake as a prop. It’s become an iconic moment in VMAs history, but it was even more terrifying than it appeared,” Spears writes. “All I knew was to look down, because I felt if I looked up and caught its eye, it would kill me.”
Spears survived the performance and is now revealing what she was going on in her mind at the time.
"In my head I was saying, Just perform, just use your legs and perform. But what nobody knows is that as I was singing, the snake brought its head right around to my face, right up to me, and started hissing,” Spears writes. “I was thinking, Are you f---ing serious right now? The f---ing goddamn snake’s tongue is flicking out at me. Right. Now. Finally, I got to the part where I handed it back, thank God."
The “Lucky” singer also opened up about the reptilian scare on Instagram back in September, when she shared a clip of the performance and revealed just “how scared” she was singing with a live python by her side.
