Reuters, LOS ANGELES: Lady Gaga stole the Grammy limelight on Sunday by arriving encased in a giant egg, and crawling out of it to perform her new single "Born This Way".
Gaga, 24, declared in a Twitter message that she was "in incubation" for her live appearance. Aides said she had spent three hours crouched inside the egg with an oxygen mask ahead of her arrival.
Borne aloft by attendants dressed in scanty gold-colored garb, the egg was the latest in a series of stunts by the performance artist and singer. In September, she wore a headline-grabbing dress made entirely of raw meat that she wore to the MTV Music Video Awards.
Onstage on Sunday, she crawled out of the egg dressed in yellow and sporting what appeared to be pointed shoulder implants.
Away from the Grammy ceremony in Los Angeles, the singer made headlines by saying in a pre-recorded TV interview that she uses marijuana and whiskey to help write her songs.
"(I) drink a lot of whiskey and I smoke weed when I write. And I don't do it a lot because it's not good for my voice," the singer told TV news show "60 Minutes".
"I don't want to encourage kids to do drugs....And I don't lie. I'm not a liar. I built good will with my fans. They know who I am. And I'm just like them in so many ways," she added.
Halfway through the Grammy ceremony, Gaga had won three of the six awards she had been nominated for -- one for her album "The Fame Monster" and two for her song "Bad Romance."
"I had this dream when I was really young that I could be whoever I wanted to be," she said in her acceptance speech.
The singer, whose real name is Stefani Germanotta, told "60 Minutes" there was always a point to her outrageous outfits.
"There's nothing that I've ever put on my body that I didn't understand where it came from, the reference of it, who inspired it. There's always some sort of a story or a concept that I'm telling," she said.
(Reporting by Jill Serjeant and Dean Goodman; Editing by Alex Dobuzinskis)
