Thank goodness for Ashlee Simpson's friend and personal assistant, Stephanie.

In the caterer's office backstage at the Ritacco Center in Toms River, New Jersey, a beige couch is pushed up against the cinderblock wall, which is papered over in black and illuminated with a line of green light. Fifteen minutes before Ashlee is due to arrive, her makeup artist marches in, a white puff of a puppy in her arms. She asks if there's a monitor she can check, then gives a quick once-over of the lighting setup as the pup — Ashlee's dog Blondie — jumps down and sniffs around the baseboards. Ashlee's bodyguard pokes his head in.The route and destination point checked over, the procession begins. The bodyguard lumbers in the lead, followed by the makeup artist, the personal assistant, the record-label rep, one or two others, and Ashlee herself. They make their way through the backstage area, past the trays of cheese cubes, sweating ham, Wonder Bread, chocolate pudding, strawberries, overcooked broccoli (which provides the dominant scent backstage) and watery chicken marsala. All food that Ashlee will not be eating.

Stephanie, dressed in a men's white T-shirt and baggy jeans, cases the caterer's office and plops down just off camera next to the sofa. Someone wraps a maroon scarf around Ashlee's neck and the singer arranges herself on the couch.

"I went to Jacob the Jeweler when I was in New York last week," Ashlee announces with a toothy white smile while her people fuss over her hair. "I got totally blinged out." She holds out her arm and shows off several thin gold bangles. Later, she would pull up her pant leg to reveal two delicate little cherries newly tattooed on her right ankle.

I ask Ashlee a question. There is a pause, then Ashlee turns to Stephanie.

"What am I afraid of?" Ashlee repeats to her assistant. The camera has been rolling for a few minutes by now.

"Heights?" Stephanie offers.

"No ..." Ashlee says.

"Well, you're not loving rodents, that's for damn sure."

"I know, but I can't say that because PETA will come after me," Ashlee says half-jokingly. She thinks for a good 10 or 15 seconds, her nostrils flare, then she finally puts the mic back up to her mouth and states with authority, "I'm scared of swimming in the ocean, because I'm always afraid that a shark is going to bite my leg." She laughs.

Another question: Knowing what she knows now, what advice would she give to her younger self?

Ashlee thinks for a while, the mic in her lap. "Ummm ... I don't ... what am I going to answer ..."

"Well, you've answered that question before in other interviews when we were overseas," Stephanie says, "and you always say that you would never change anything and that you would always tell yourself to be tough-skinned."

"OK," Ashlee says, "if I were to go back to the beginning of my career, I wouldn't change a thing, because everything that I have learned has made me so much stronger."

So yes, thank goodness for Stephanie.
In her song "Autobiography," Ashlee sings, "Nobody's really seen my million subtleties," and Stephanie helps her friend make sure that it stays that way, either by assisting her in nailing down what they think is the inoffensive, "right" (and ultimately vague) reply, or encouraging her to just bow out when a simple answer isn't there ("What are some of my million subtleties? How will I answer that? Any advice, Stephanie?" Ashlee asks with a pensive look on her face. "Maybe you could come back to that question," Stephanie says.)
We do see a bit of who Ashlee is on "The Ashlee Simpson Show." But the singer makes sure we don't get any closer than she wants us to — what we see is what she wants us to see. Ashlee's caginess when faced with questions trying to get at "who she really is" comes across largely as a well-thought-out strategy to keep a distance and maintain control over her privacy and innermost feelings. Privacy, for Ashlee, is worth more than her new bling. "When we're shooting the show," she says, "every now and then I'd be like, 'OK, I have to go have my "me" time' — even if it is just sitting in my bathroom."

The singer's reliance on her best friend and a we're-all-in-this-together view of her career helps explain why her female teen and tween fans love her so much — almost all young girls do the same thing, seeing themselves and their friends as one many-limbed entity that moves together and figures stuff out together. This is why girls travel in packs to the restroom. Why they walk through the school halls clutching their pal's arm like they'll collapse if they let go. Why a group of friends will all buy the same soft-serve ice cream with colored sprinkles from the Ritacco Center's concession stand.

Many girls also identify with the horrifying embarrassment and very public humiliation that Ashlee has had to endure over the past year, which basically mirrors every girl's own tripping and falling in the classroom or having her crush call her ugly to her face — but multiplied by a million, of course, in Ashlee's case. And if she can get through the bumpy spots — the "Saturday Night Live" lip-synching debacle, the Orange Bowl booing, her tour kickoff when her guitarist's instrument fell off and skittered across the stage during the opening number — anybody can.

"I've been through a lot of tough situations throughout this whole year, but I've managed to keep myself together because I figure, you know, things happen to everybody," Ashlee explains. "If I just let go and crumble, then I would be so upset with myself, just like anybody would. It's all about keeping yourself together and looking forward to the future." Like so many other fans, Devin Barry, a 16-year-old from Jackson, New Jersey, and one of the very, very few males in attendance at the concert, sees the singer's "Saturday Night Live" blunder as having a big upside. "I like that Ashlee had the ability to bounce back after the 'SNL' thing," he says on the venue floor. "That takes some real heart."

Some of the other guys at the show like more than Ashlee's heart, of course.
Twenty-year-old Matt Cuciniello from Bricktown, New Jersey, and his two buddies sport hand-printed T-shirts that say "You Want Pieces of Me?" on the back and "Wanna La La?" on the front. When asked why he loves Ashlee so much, Cuciniello says, "Because she makes pieces of me want to la la!"

But these hormonal dudes are an anomaly: The other 98 percent of the concertgoers are female and say they love Ashlee for reasons like "she's so unique compared to other female artists" and "she's great because she's so not like her sister" (thank you Micaela Rehak, 16, from Island Heights, New Jersey), and "she's got her own style — I like her originality" (Nicole Panuthos, 17, from Jackson, New Jersey).

Whether she's actually original or not — she has many critics who will argue she is anything but — what matters is that both Ashlee and her fans believe that she is, and that she always stays true to that original self.
"The image that you see of me is really who I am," Ashlee says. "Even when I'm alone, you know, in my bathroom with no cameras, whatever it may be, I am still the same person."
Many of the girls at the concert are wearing tan or pink Ugg boots with micro-mini pleated denim skirts. Hundreds wave the green glow sticks they bought for $5 off a heavily tattooed girl toting them around in a basket. Some are probably 10 or 11, wide-eyed, legs too long for their boyish torsos, teeth a little bit too big for their mouths; and some are 13 or 14, carrying Coach bags, wearing a lot of pearly lip gloss and revealing serious cleavage. Hundreds stomp around in Chuck Taylors.

As does Ashlee during her performance. She opens with "Autobiography" and slinks onstage in a knee-length black jacket embroidered with spangly silver and gold appliqués, pinstriped black jeans and a black and yellow T-shirt. She works the front of the stage, leaning over and belting the big notes into the mic (yes, she hits the big notes — and all the notes). By the second song, "Nothing New," Stephanie is sitting on the edge of the stage behind a black curtain, looking up at Ashlee attentively as if to see if her friend needs anything. Apparently all is good, because she's gone just as suddenly as she had appeared.

During the course of her set, Ashlee makes a point of returning to a spot at the foot of the stage where there's a gap between the monitors. Here, the fans can reach their hands up to their idol while screaming along with the lyrics. As the glow sticks whirl around like fireflies in the bleachers, as the moms in the crowd politely bop along, Ashlee bends over and reaches down, flashing her trademark big smile, and takes the girls' hands in hers — over and over and over again, to their complete, utter, tear-stained delight.