Outside of the In-Crowd – Duckface is on the loose!

Courtney Enlow

Very recently, we said goodbye to a teen idol of questionable personal history but very certain impact on the youth of America.

I speak, of course, of the final episode of Hannah Montana.

Yes, Sunday evening, Hannah Montana sang her swan song, ending not with a bang, but a duckfaced whimper, complete with promise of a tacked on summer season, so that she could go bang some dude without the watchful eye of Disney. And that, gentle reader, is where the trouble begins for us.

You see, until now, this has been Miley Lite. The underwear pics, the boob tattoo, the questionable boyfriends, the REALLY questionable parentage, this has all been the sanitized version of our Mi Cy. And now that she’s free from the reigns, Miley is able to run wild. Just like Hannah/Miley Stewart’s horse Blue Jeans.

*cough, collar tug* Anyeeeeewaaaaaay …

It’s possible, even probable that Miley’s aim to misbehave has been an act of rebellion against the forces of purity that made her, and that’s to be expected. You can’t throw a slutty rock at Disney without it hitting a slutty future cokehead. That’s just how it goes ’round those parts, and it’s due to the zero-to-uberfamous transition these kids experience. One day their Toddlers and Tiaras castoffs with moms whose meth habit isn’t going to support itself, the next day they’re on the red carpet at the Teen Choice Awards. So they start small with nosejobs and scantily-clad photos, then move to full nudie camera phone pics, mysterious white dust in their nosehairs and being carried out of clubs before they’re 18 and living at the Roosevelt by themselves with only Jack Daniels to watch over them.

Maybe the lack of the ever-watchful mouse will make Miley calm down. But losing Walt’s ghost can only do so much. Because she still has the ultimate pair of anti-assets working against her: her parents.

I told you last week about her mother’s embarrassing showcase of fame-hunger at the Oscars, and you’ve no doubt seen her father’s equally embarrassing facial hair and stupidass soul patch. But these are only the tips of the parental iceberg. Exhibit A: I give you Noah Cyrus.

This is Noah prior to her taste of sweet sweet fame.

This is the after.

She’s nine years old.

Okay, yes, the above was a Halloween picture, but HELLO, whose parents let them dress like that for Halloween? Certainly not mine, and certainly not at NINE EFFING YEARS OLD. Jeepers.

Look, when it comes down to it, I don’t find Miley Cyrus particularly offensive as a human being. What she truly stands for is what gets to me.

There are thousands of parents who see people like Tish and Billy Ray Cyrus, Dina Lohan, various reality TV show mothers and those horrid pageant moms on various beauty pageant shows/To Catch a Predator-bait programs, and they don’t think, “Why would these parents choose to put their children into this dark world of debauchery to lose them forever?” They think, “How did they do this, and how can I do it better?”

The Soup showed a preview clip from E!’s new skank parade Pretty Wild the other night. This clip featured a mother, if you can call her that, of three girls. She gives each girl Adderall and then sends them on their way, and their way leads to a stripper pole in the middle of the living room that they spin around in bikinis. There are parents out there that watch this and genuinely think, “My child could do that too one day.” This is tragic.

So Miley got away from her Disney overlords into the loving arms of two parents of a similar mindset to the above. What could potentially save her: Career failure.

The problem with Lindsay Lohan is that she got too big after her Disney success. She went from Herbie: Fully Loaded to Mean Girls and from Mean Girls to anorexia and cocaine. If Miley is going to have any hope, she’s going to need to pray that her first big non-Hannah flick, The Last Song, bombs. Because, like Lindsay Lohan, the kid’s just not talented enough for a real shot, and, sorry, she’s just not pretty enough for the Jessica Alba-type roles.

Maybe she’ll be a Faith Hill-style country singer. She can stick to music, lay low and have a fairly simple career of making money and being in the limelight as needed. Or maybe she’s been bitten too hard by the fame bug since birth and there’s no hope that she can escape the dreams of her parents.

Is it better to burn out or fade away? In the child star world, they should all be praying they fade away. Because we just lost another one, and these kids seem to be in no hurry to learn lessons from the ones who fell hard.

Courtney Enlow is a writer living in Chicago and working as a corporate shill to pay the bills. You can contact her at courtney@hobotrashcan.com.