The capital of Crazy is in Montana.

Hannah, Montana.

In Hannah, MT, there is unlimited income. The residents are all parents of pre-teen girls. The streets look like seventh grade lockers, and strawberry-kiwi lip gloss flows from the taps. There isn’t much to do in this little hamlet except join the fan club, monitor StubHub for scalped tickets that sell for at least a grand, and fire off scathing letters of protest. Oh yes, and you must be at least 35, have once had a functioning brain stem, but somehow during that last eBay ticket war in which you paid $8000 for a pair of loge seats for her Columbus date with another mother, HMFan2, who bedazzled a fictitious 14 year old’s theme song on the bumper of her Lexus SUV, lost all functioning grasp on reality.

If you’ve just recently been chiseled out of a glacier and do not know of the Hannah Montana of whom I speak, then let me enlighten you. Miley Cyrus, teenaged daughter of
Billy Ray, plays a pop star on a Disney Channel television show of the same name. Granted, most preteen programming doesn’t make national headlines, but this show recently announced a national concert tour, and is selling out within milliseconds across the country.

Now Miley Cyrus is as cute as a button on Tatu’s white suit. She’s talented. She is more entertaining than the scores of teen stars before her and the scores that will follow. But I suspect that her show is actually a spin-off of “Sabrina the Teenaged Witch,” because she has cast a spell across the maternal population that can only be from a supernatural source.

In all my years of working in the entertainment industry—which are considerable—I’ve never quite seen the likes of this. I’ve seen rabid fans of The Who, The Stones, Springsteen, U2, Madonna, Elton, throw their undergarments upon the stage freely, but never have I seen the parents of said rabid fans throw their American Express cards with even more abandon.

The craziest part of this entire Cyrus circus is what parents of these pre-teen fans have become. There are millions of orphans running around unsupervised as their mothers spend 23 hours a day hooked to a catheter so they can monitor fan message boards. There are phone calls, emails, and letters to the editor flying at the injustice that there are only 22,000 seats in a given city, which only covers a handful of junior high schools. The situation is so heinous in the minds of some of the parental populace that Attorney Generals in at least three separate states are investigating why every chauffer and personal valet didn’t get an order form for the presale. U.N. ambassadors are considering stepping in to handle the disputes.

My husband works in the field. Since the show has been announced in his venue, he hasn’t slept from the ringing of his inbox alerting him to untold numbers of ticket requests. Part of the nature of the beast of his profession is such requests, but few resemble grown women begging at his feet. At first I took umbrage thinking they were thrusting their phone numbers at him, but I soon realized that they were simply writing their credit card digits. In addition to the flowers, fruit baskets and gift certificates that arrive daily, there are first born children on my door step. We need a police escort to go to little league games. We had to take out a restraining order so he could walk past Hollister at the Mall.

When demand surpasses supply (which happened the moment Miley Cyrus cut her first tooth apparently) he received hate emails. I suspect the death threats will arrive shortly, followed by a panic room stay with Jodi Foster and Salman Rushdie as roommates. He has been called worse names than an Al Pacino film. It is a moot point, because our kids’ tickets have already been the sacrificial offering to the tow truck guy with keys to the boot that was on my back tire on the morning of the sell out.

I can only imagine what the actual concert scene will look like. Will parents think it lived up to all of their considerable efforts? That it substantiated governmental intervention? Was it really worth the lawyer’s fees, the second mortgage and the complete abandonment of every value you once held dear? Or will it be like the Olympics where you begin training again the day after winning the medal? Will there be immediate resumption of fingers trained on the refresh key of the computer? Re-sharpening of the claws to recommence the cat fight with the other members of the PTA for a spot on the waiting list? Tough to call at this point.

The only thing that is becoming clear to me is that Hannah, Montana is eerily close to Stepford, Connecticut.

©2007 Tracey Henry