Miles to Go (9 page)

The Spotlight

D
espite my mouthful of humble pie, life kept going—full throttle. I went on tour, opening for The Cheetah Girls’ The Party’s Just Begun tour in the fall of 2006. We were done shooting the first season of
Hannah Montana
, but only half of it had aired on TV. Before The Cheetah Girls concert, nobody knew if folks would care that I was opening for them. True,
Hannah Montana
had been an instant success, but that didn’t mean anybody wanted to see me in concert
as Hannah
. Hannah’s a fictional singer. Maybe all her fame was fictional too. So the concert creators kept it cheap. There was no dramatic curtain, parting slowly to reveal me onstage. Nor did I rise up on a platform like a real rocker. So how
did
I appear onstage? Two dancers stood holding a plain white bed sheet up to hide me, then dropped it. That’s right—a bed sheet. I had four dancers.
(Now I'm up to twelve dancers.)
I had a band track instead of an actual band.
(Now I have a seven-person band.)
Hannah’s costumes were all straight off the rack of Forever 21.
(Now all Hannah's clothes are custom-sewn.)
But I didn’t care if I was standing in front of a plain black wall.
My dad always says that a real musician can make a great show out of anything, no matter how small.
I was determined to be a great musician.

When you’re the opening act, you figure nobody’s there to see
you
. They come in with their friends; they’re talking, goofing around, and getting psyched for the main act, and they have zero reason to pay any attention to that random girl in a blond wig who thinks she’s a TV star. But this concert mattered a heck of a lot to me. It was my first and possibly only chance to show everyone what I could do as a performer, and I couldn’t afford to mess it up. I was supposed to get the crowd excited. If they weren’t pumped when The Cheetah Girls came onstage, I’d be to blame.

The shows all sold out, which was a surprise to everyone. I liked a big audience. At least with that many people, I didn’t have to worry that there’d be no applause, just crickets. I could handle the number of people—I hoped.

I’m never alone backstage. Before the show starts, my dancers and I have a little ritual. We gather in a circle with our hands together in the center and shout, “Pop off!”
(It's my show and my ritual. You'd think I'd know why we say "pop off." But I don't.)
Then my stage manager, Scottie Dog, a tattooed old-time rock ’n’ roller, shows me where to wait and stays with me until I go on.

As I stood backstage on opening night, my blond wig was already itchy, hot, and sweaty. And I had to pee. Badly. But it was too late. (Story of my life— having to pee when it’s too late to go is my body’s code for: you’re nervous and you might mess up!) Scottie Dog signaled me, and I walked out to the microphone. I looked through the sheet at the crowd at KeyArena in downtown Seattle. Over 16,000 people were staring back at me (or at my plain white bed sheet, anyway), waiting for me to perform. I felt really little up there onstage. I
was
really little! Why should
I
be up there? How could I ever win over that many people? But cheerleading had taught me to channel my fear into energy. I may have felt little, but I was ready to do everything bigger and better to compensate.

I took a deep breath, the sheet dropped, and I opened with “I Got Nerve.” I didn’t know if I could keep a crowd of 16,000 from throwing tomatoes at me (or maybe peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches—it was a young crowd). But I did know that I loved to sing, so I started by just focusing on that.

As soon as I started singing, I relaxed a little. After a while I felt calm enough to take a tiny peek at the audience. So I looked out . . . and I could not believe what I saw. It was a sea of Hannah Montana T-shirts! This audience wasn’t there just for The Cheetah Girls. They knew who I was! (Or they knew who my TV character was when she wasn’t herself. But let’s not be picky.) When I started singing “I’ve Got Nerve,” the crowd actually sang along with me. They knew every single word! Soon I could hear them chanting “Hannah!” and “Miley!” (See? They did know who I was. Or, rather, they knew who my TV character was when she was herself. But again, let’s not be picky.)

My mom was backstage with my manager, Jason. They looked at each other and their mouths just dropped open.
What? This was out of control!

So little time had passed since I’d been in sixth grade, holding back tears on a daily basis.
(My lowest low.)
Those girls had made me feel completely worthless, invisible. But this was it: the equal and opposite reaction I had been hoping for. Here it was, proof that they hadn’t stopped me. If anything, they had pushed me forward. For all that darkness, it wasn’t over. Now a light was shining on me.
I was lifted up, not so much by success or fame or anything to do with Hollywood status as by the moment. My heart was flying. My soul was soaring. I felt radiant.

Sure, if I could do it over again, I’d rather not suffer through those sixth-grade moments. But now, now that it was over, somewhere in the cruelty of those girls there was a gift for me. I’d put all the memories at the bottom of the ocean, but now that past floated back to me like a message in a bottle. I looked at it, felt happy, respected it, then threw it back again.

As I hit the final chords of “I’ve Got Nerve,” I thought, “This is for them.”

I didn’t stop to question what the audience’s response meant about the show’s popularity or my career. I recognized what was happening from my dad’s concerts. Kids were singing along with every word. Parents were dancing with their kids. I looked at their faces and I saw joy. My dad always says that at that moment—when you, the band, the audience, when you all make music together—you become one.
That’s harmony.
And that is what it is all for.

Life can be unpredictable and hard. There are plenty of bleak things in the world that we all could be thinking about. Maybe we should be. But on that night, in that moment, all singing along with each other? That was something we all shared, and while we were singing, whatever problems there were in the world, whatever troubles people were having at home, whatever bullies were waiting after school for some other kids in the crowd, to me it felt like maybe we’d put that all out of our minds for a tiny bit of time and just enjoyed one another’s company. I brought the audience a little light. I had found a way to make people happy. That’s as good as it gets.

I played twenty shows for The Cheetah Girls in one month, finishing on October 14 in Charlotte, North Carolina. Ten days later the
Hannah Montana
sound track—all music from the TV show—was released. My life was starting to feel like the best Christmas ever— each present was a new opportunity or news of a success I’d only imagined in my wildest dreams. The sound track debuted at the top of the Billboard charts.

Heck, yeah! Hannah Montana was no longer an opening act. She was a headliner. My dreams had come true. I was a singer. And an actor. So what if the dream come true had a straight blond wig glued on top? This girl wasn’t complaining. You know that old expression:
A wig on the head is better than a head in the sixth-grade toilet.
Okay, maybe it’s not the most common expression. Let’s just say I know not to look a gift horse in the mouth!

Bad Luck in St. Louis

B
efore we went on The Cheetah Girls tour, my mom made one demand. Usually when you’re on tour for a concert, the whole crew stays on buses together. I was sharing a crew with The Cheetah Girls, so the total group was big—about a hundred people divided among maybe four buses. The dancers, two boys and two girls, were all in their twenties. I was thirteen years old. Mom said she didn’t care if I didn’t make a dime on the tour. She just wanted to make things as normal as possible for me. So we paid for an extra bus for just me, Mom, Mammie, and Noah. (The rest of the kids stayed in school.) After the show I’d come back to the bus, do schoolwork, then watch a movie with Mom and Noah. It was all weirdly normal. If there’s such thing as normal when you’re a teenager doing a twenty-city concert tour.

I was psyched that my mom went for the bonus bus. Being with the crew is fun for a little while, but it’s impossible for me to live like that. I have to have space. I need the downtime. And it was more than just mental. Like I said before, weird or not, I’m okay being alone.

Even though the tour bus situation was sorted out, not everything was perfectly smooth on that tour. To be specific—two words represent how NOT smooth things were . . . St. Louis. I have nothing against St. Louis in principle, but I can’t say I want to go back.

My bad luck in St. Louis started on that tour, and hasn’t let up since. I was onstage in the middle of singing “Who Said” when I started feeling really sick, like I was going to throw up. I ran off the stage. It was really bad. My dancers just kept going. They didn’t even notice I was gone!
(Thanks, guys!)

As soon as I started to feel better—about five minutes later—I hurried back onstage. I said, “Sorry, guys. I had to hurl.” (Later my mom was like, “Real classy, Miles. Guess you’re never having dinner at Buckingham Palace.”) Then it happened again. I had to run offstage during “Best of Both Worlds.” So much for “the show must go on.” I thought it was a stomach bug, and by the next day (we were still in St. Louis) I was feeling better, so I went on that night.

It happened yet again. Somehow I made it through the show this time, but in the next city, Dallas, I went to a doctor. He said I was fine, but at the show that night I felt bad again. This wasn’t normal. And it wasn’t nerves. Nerves meant having to pee when it was too late to go. This was different. Something felt really wrong. I went to another doctor, and this time they did an echocardiogram.
(An echocardiogram uses ultrasound to look at your heart. It’s totally painless. Like when they look at a pregnant woman's baby, except if they see a baby in your heart you're in big trouble.)
They found a hole in my heart (and this was
before
my first breakup!), but they said the real problem was tachycardia.

Tachycardia means my heart rate speeds up and the rest of my body can’t keep up. (
Tachy
means too fast and
cardia
means heart. When I told Brazz my diagnosis, he said, “You sure it’s not tachymouthia?”) It just figures that if I had a problem, it would be that part of my body works harder than it should and goes too fast. I’ve always been an overachiever.

The type of tachycardia I have isn’t dangerous. It won’t hurt me, but it does bother me. My heart rate increases a lot just from going up a flight of stairs. It’s worse when I wear a wig. I get hot, my body tries to cool down, and my heart goes extra fast. When I wear that wig in a concert, it sometimes gets so I can’t breathe and can’t think. I feel claustrophobic. There is never a time onstage when I’m not thinking about my heart.

My diagnosis stopped me in my tracks. On that tour, I felt like it was really important to me to look great. I wasn’t eating much. Some days I’d eat one Pop-Tart. That was it. Not good. I’ve always struggled with my weight, but when I found out I had a hole in my heart—there was no way in heck being skinny was worth sacrificing my health. I was scared. Like lots of girls my age, I can be self-conscious about my looks, but it was immediately clear to me that I’d much rather be healthy and normal-sized. The minute I got home from that tour, my dad took me to one of my favorite Chinese restaurants, Panda Express. He said, “You have a hole in your heart, child. We’re eating food.”

I always thought that working as hard as I possibly could was the path toward achieving my dreams. But my body has limits that I have to respect.
I have to take care of myself, or I’ll feel sick. Now I make sure to eat well, get enough sleep, and avoid caffeine before shows. (That one was the only
really
hard one—I love Coke!)

On that tour, I learned that I can push too hard. It’s easy to do. The fans would cheer me on, and the producers would cheer me on, and my family and friends would cheer me on.
But I’m the one in the driver’s seat, and if anyone applies the brakes, it’s got to be me.
It was an important lesson for me to learn. In a way, I think it’s a kind of blessing that I have to be careful, because I should be taking care of myself anyway. It forces me to keep things in balance.

Yeah, and about St. Louis. The next time I went there—to sing the national anthem at a Cardinals game—the game got rained out.
And
St. Louis was the venue for the first show of my tour with the Jonas Brothers, which you would think was a good thing . . . but more on that later.