The youngest of my small brood is a big Hannah Montana fan. Because I want to share her interests, I have watched the hit Disney Channel program with her several times and we often share a few laughs together over the show’s wholesome, good-humor, family friendly jokes and wacky situations.

I am going to let you in on a little secret. After a day of work, bad news, world news, war news and various auto repair and other homeowner issues, I enjoy the mindless escape of a Hannah Montana episode. I won’t watch it alone, of course. That would be weird. I’m an adult.

If you have very small children and are mired in the bizarre cult of Dora the Explorer, or your kids are in college and you actually read books and do other adult type activities (no, not those), you may be unfamiliar with the Hannah Montana phenomenon.

Hannah Montana is a child singing star played by Miley Cyrus, the daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus, he of “Achy Breaky Heart” fame. Hannah Montana is the character’s stage name as she lives a secret life of a normal middle schooler except during those times when she performs as a teen singing sensation. Billy Ray plays her father in the show and he may or may not be the worst actor on TV, not that it matters to the ratings.

As art often imitates crap, er, life, Disney has sent young Miley out on a U.S. concert tour to perform both as herself and the fictional Hannah Montana. A very cute and lucrative idea. I wish I’d thought of it.

Word broke a few months ago that the tour would be making a stop in the Twin Cities. I hatched a family fun plan to purchase tickets for daughter two and maybe even daughter one. After all, how expensive could it be? For gosh sakes, she is only a fictional character on a television show. The Monkees and The Partridge Family didn’t sell out every concert, did they?

Evidently they did, and so did Miss Cyrus. Tickets for Hannah Montana sold out in 38 seconds and quickly began showing up on Ebay and Craig’s List for amounts ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, many times face value. Dang! Plan scuttled. No Hannah Montana concert for my daughters.

Local media reported that few if any local folks ended up with seats during the initial ticket sale. Even those that had signed up for the Hannah Montana fan club at 30 bucks a pop for an opportunity for preferred seats ended up getting the shaft.

It has been alleged that ticket brokers are now using software that can swarm online companies like TicketMaster within seconds of seats becoming available. The software bombards the site, even managing to read and enter the squiggly “captcha” word that ticket sellers use to thwart the brokers. Word is that these resellers end up with around 80 percent of tickets for popular shows.

During times like this I get weepy and nostalgic for the days when a guy could sit in line for days eating soggy sandwiches and urinating on the sidewalk waiting for hot tickets to great shows like Jefferson Airplane, Kiss, Anne Murray and Flock of Seagulls. The advantage being that even if you were number 7,000 in line, you were still going to get a seat at face value if you hadn’t frozen to death by the time the ticket window opened.

No, those days are gone and there is no going back. What it means to me is that my family will make a slight shift in our entertainment direction over the course of the next few years.

I was going to take the wife to Bruce Springsteen. Instead, I have secured seats to what reviewers are calling an exceptional performance of Pink Floyd’s The Wall album by the Jordan United Methodist Women’s bell choir. Ham buns and coffee follow the performance. Score!

Rather than pay a fortune for bad seats to see Justin Timberlake, the girls and I will be enjoying a Lawrence Welk tribute show at the community center in Victoria (got second-row folding chairs).

And saving the best for last, because obviously I could not get Hannah Montana tickets, I am taking the entire family to see Andy Griffith and Jim Nabors perform Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice at Bob’s Big Boy up in Rogers.

Now what kid wouldn’t love that?