Family Falsely Claims Dad Was Blown Up In Iraq To Avoid Paying Scalper For Hannah Montana Tickets
After spending 12 months chronicling the depths to which the cash-strapped middle-classes would stoop in order to obtain sold-out Hannah Montana tickets, what better way to finish out Idolator’s year of Montana misadventures than with the gladdening tale of a 6-year-old who won her tickets simply by writing a very brave, very personal essay for a contest sponsored by girl’s clothing store Club Libby Lu. Very brave, very personal, and almost all of it factually correct. Except for this part: “My daddy died this year in Iraq.”
The saga began Friday with company officials surprising the girl at a Club Libby Lu at a mall in suburban Garland, northeast of Dallas. The girl won a makeover that included a blonde Hannah Montana wig, as well as the grand prize: airfare for four to Albany, New York, and four tickets to the sold-out Hannah Montana concert on January 9.
The mother had told company officials that the girl’s father died April 17 in a roadside bombing in Iraq, company spokeswoman Robyn Caulfield said.
“We did the essay and that’s what we did to win,” Priscilla Ceballos, the mother, said in an interview with Dallas TV station KDFW. “We did whatever we could do to win.”
Since the company discovered that daddy didn’t actually come home in a flag-draped coffin, they’re “considering” making the little liar return these illest-gotten tickets, perhaps because they’re so impressed by her display of good ol’ fashioned American amorality. Between this and the plague of Disney CDs mistakenly featuring Cam’ron and Juelz Santana, God’s really squeezing in the most bonkers Montana-related stories of the year in these final days, and since I only have a few hours left to say this: Is it 2008 yet?
