We Get It Miley Cyrus, You’re Not Hannah Montana

For those of us with children, there are moments when you walk through the living room, glance at what your loved ones are watching on television and say, out loud, “oh good God, this is what you call entertainment?” Then you deliver the laundry or the school book bags upstairs to their rooms and their walls are kudzued with posters of people with questionable talent. You can only shake their head and lie to yourself that you didn’t participate in the same practices at their age. For much of the 00s or the aughts or whatever we’re calling them, Miley Cyrus played sweet and wholesome Hannah Montana on the Disney Channel. Since the beginning of the teens, so you know, the last two years, Cyrus has gone above and the beyond the call of  “I swear ya’ll, I ain’t Hannah” duty.

Technically, she’s not Miley. She was born with the even more stripperesque name, Destiny Cyrus, in Nashville, Tennessee, 19 years and 11 months ago. Her dad wore a mullet and killed his career along with the respect I had for people in my own family, with the number one heap of junk “song”, Achy Breaky Heart, also in 1992. Destiny the concept was bastardized twenty years ago when Destiny was created. Along the way she changed her name to the more impressively regal and adult, “Miley” and became a recording star, and the lead character of perhaps the most successful kids show in television history.

As Miley Stewart, the “normal” girl, and Hannah Montana, her music star alter ego (because asking the daughter of Billy Ray to work with two fake names would’ve been way too hard), Miley Cyrus grew up in front of us. It was a tough experience for Miley. She couldn’t kiss anyone on the show. She couldn’t get tattooed. She couldn’t chop all of her hair off into something indescribable. Oh, and she couldn’t act like an out of control teenager for laughs…or for the heck of it.

But she can now. Since leaving the Hannah Montana show behind. Miley Cyrus is begging for all of us to know, she’s just as crazy and troubled as Lohan or  a Kardashian.

Her appearance this week on the sex-obessessed, not funny without Charlie Sheen, still inexplicably successful sitcom, Two And A Half Men, seems to have been met with a “what the…yawn”. She plays the nubile tart daughter of a friend of Ashton Kutcher’s character. She tries to seduce him then ends up kissing the younger cast member, the son of Jon Cryer. What Miley fails to realize, this has been done before. Jesse Spano/Liz Berkeley in the horror classic Showgirls, anyone?

I realize going to college, working on your acting and singing crafts, and figuring out how to mix your new adulthood with a famous childhood is boring. But Miley’s has to stop traipsing after every child actor cliché. Smoking weed, engagement at 19-years-old, posing nude on the web, and coming off as trashy doesn’t make her a bad person. But it will make her the butt of a joke with no career or worse, by age twenty-five. She’s only 19. There’s plenty of time for this to go good, even with Billy Ray as her dad. Christina Aquilera pulled her irons out of the Dirrty fire.

We get it, Miley Cyrus, you’re not Hannah Montana.