The Best Disguise in Los Angeles

Miley Cyrus was hosting the MTV VMAs that Sunday and she was not, as they say, wasting anyone’s time with subtlety. In the days before the show she went on Jimmy Kimmel to talk about her breasts, which at that point in time were genuinely a topic of national interest, and then she disguised herself as an Australian journalist and went out into the streets of Los Angeles to ask strangers what they thought of Miley Cyrus.

The disguise was not particularly convincing. The outfit was the kind of thing that calls attention to itself in roughly the same way a flare gun does. She asked people what had gone wrong with Miley, what they’d do if they were her father, whether they thought she’d gone too far. Some of them didn’t recognize her. Some of them recognized her immediately and played along. And a fortunate few ended the encounter with Miley Cyrus’s tits in their face, which is one of those things that happens to some people and not others and there’s really no accounting for it.

Whatever you think of the VMAs as an institution—and I’ve thought less and less of them as I’ve gotten older—she understood exactly what kind of show it was and decided to lean into it until it broke. Respect.