April Fools’: Ke$ha offers student $ch0l@r$h*p
March 30, 2011
Ke$ha might not seem like the school type — brushing her teeth with Jack Daniels every morning… Ke$ha might not seem like the school type — brushing her teeth with Jack Daniels every morning — but she sincerely cares about the higher education of our youth.
After the songstress confirmed her decision to sing at Pitt’s annual Bigelow Bash, she also made another announcement: Ke$ha will give a scholarship to one lucky Pitt student.
The Ke$ha $ch0l@r$h*p Fund will pay the remainder of one student’s tuition. To be eligible, students must have at least one unconventional letter in their name, display a thorough knowledge of all Ke$ha lyrics and sweat glitter.
Hector McDougal, head of the Pitt Presentation Committee, said Ke$ha’s decision came after she noticed a lot of mustachioed men in all the pictures she saw of Pitt’s campus.
“She met me and saw my face rug and was all like, ‘I like your beard.’ That chick really digs beards,” he said.
But there’s more than that, Ke$ha said. The lady who makes the hipsters fall in love explains that she was on track to go to Columbia for psychology when she instead chose pop stardom — a decision that has had a profound effect on her adult development.
“I wasted too much precious time chasin’ stupid high school guys. They’ve had their last chance,” she said, explaining that she wanted to give the opportunities she had forgone to a Pitt student.
But Ke$ha doesn’t want to give her hard-earned coinage to just any college-goer: She’s looking to support kids like her, who might not fit in everywhere — kids like her sister, H@nn@h.
“Growing up with a dollar sign in her name was difficult,” H@nn@h said of her sibling. “We just went through a lot with trying to be taken seriously. I think she wants kids with unconventional letters in their name to know that somebody cares.”
The student who earns the scholarship must memorize several of Ke$ha’s lesser-known songs. One student who plans to apply for the $ch0l@r$h*p is Pitt sophomore 3dith Montgomery.
“Some people spend their afternoons memorizing Shakespeare or Wordsworth, but I just can’t relate to them. I believe in Ke$ha’s raw, poetic style, her humanness … just how real she is. I know every song. It was a personal project,” Montgomery said.
Montgomery also shares another quality with the pop star that could help her in achieving the $ch0l@r$h*p — she and Ke$ha have the same genetic disorder that causes them to sweat glitter.
Ke$ha has long been applauded and criticized for her apparently excessive sparkle use, but the singer recently came out and stated that she suffers from a disease — Twinkle’s 84th Chromosome Disorder — that converts moisture in her body to glitter.
Montgomery can relate to the struggles of growing up with Twinkle’s 84, as she refers to it.
“I mean, I got called all kinds of names: ‘sparkle sweat,’ ‘the twinkling weirdo’ … the worst was ‘disco misfit.’ That one always hurt most,” she said.
But Ke$ha has come to embrace Twinkle’s 84 as a part of her persona and her life.
“We R who we R,” she said of people like her and Montgomery, going on to note that this is exactly why the $ch0l@r$h*p exists — to give students like 3dith Montgomery a chance to be themselves.