Hannah Montana / Miley Cyrus – Who?!?!

Good grief! I cannot keep up with my kids – Yesterday was crazy in Austin, TX as Hannah Montana / Miley Cyrus showed up for her concert here, along with Aly & A.J.

All this fuss over a teenage singer… So many people including myself think it is madness the way some parents spoil their children spending hundreds of dollars on tickets for what amounts to a children’s show.

However, there is something to be said about “gladdening the heart of a child.”

Bottom line – I am proud of my daughter, she is a great, kind, polite, considerate girl at all times (well, most of the time…) She never came to us begging to go to this event, she realized that we did not have the money to spend on something like this especially with all of her girlfriends at school talking about how much scalped tickets were costing the people who were going. My wife had mentioned something to me about a week ago that it might be something that our daughter might want to go to, so I spoke with her about it and she told me that she thought it would be fun, but that she knew she would not be able to go. I really was very proud that she had come to that “realization” on her own – she has a great head on her shoulders.

So, yesterday was like any other day until I received a call from my wife that a friend of ours had an extra ticket, but it was separate from the family that was going. Of course, we were not going to let our ten year old daughter sit by herself in a concert, but, it started me thinking about how I would love to do this for her (be able to send her to something which she would remember for years…) so I started searching the internet for tickets.

I found tickets being sold by “internet scalpers” – companies which profit off of ticket shoppers by purchasing hundreds of tickets at a time, as soon as they go on sale. Two tickets behind the stage at the Frank Erwin Center were going for $350 last night from these sellers (the original price for the same tickets were about $105 – not each, but for two). We looked on Craigslist and it was full of offers for tickets if you paid hundreds of dollars per seat. Basically, I had given up and then thought of a totally crazy idea and tried one more thing – I did a search on Google for Hannah Montana Frank Erwin… (so crazy, it just might work…) – and found a site – Texas Box Office – they were selling plenty of tickets in good seats for face value – a friend of mine couldn’t believe his eyes – he had paid about $300 for two tickets earlier in the week from a “Craigslist benefactor” (I use the term very sarcastically).

We purchased our 2 tickets from Texas Box Office for $153 which included taxes and fees – that was the final price for seats which were in front of the stage in section 45. To my mind, still a lot of money – but, my daughter had a great time, she is a great girl and her heart was definitely “gladdened” *grins*