What do Disneyland and performer Pink have in common? Neither is super psyched about the idea of cremated remains on or around them.
At the British Summer Time festival in London this weekend, a fan captured video of the singer crouching down to pick up a plastic baggie that had evidently been tossed onstage by a fan. It was, apparently, the cremated remains of a concertgoer’s mother.
“Is this your mom?” Pink asks, furrowing her brow at the bag in her hand. “I don’t know how I feel about this.”
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She timidly set the baggie down near the edge of the stage and continued performing, appropriately enough, her 2001 hit song “Just Like a Pill.” Perhaps, as she says in the song, she wanted at that moment to run just as fast as she could to the middle of nowhere? What’s the protocol for when you’re just trying to be the headlining act at a music festival and someone goes and lobs their mother’s ashes at you? This spangled leotard is made for singing and maybe for doing some aerial work later, not for providing final resting places. The act was less a spreading of the ashes, and more a…consolidated conveyance of ashes. We have many questions: Did this anonymous concertgoer intend for Pink to scatter the ashes herself, or is the stage the intended target? Who’s going to have to pick that baggie up eventually, and what will they do with it? Is a soul ever really at rest?
The United Kingdom doesn’t have specific laws banning the spreading of human ashes, though it’s the rule (and also just good manners) to get the permission of the person who owns the land you’d like to commemorative sprinkle with the remnants of a loved one. From her reaction, Pink was definitely not in on this plan.
The Great Pink Mommy Flinging of 2023 follows other recent high-profile on-stage disturbances: Bebe Rexha was recently hit in the face with a phone while performing in New York and needed stitches, and Ava Max was attacked and scratched in the eye last week.
In some classic friend-of-a-friend stuff, one Twitter user claimed that her pal was near the ash catapulter and got the scoop: The lady’s mom was sick and didn’t get out much before she passed. And now…she does?
“So she get out now it’s not everyone’s cup of tea but if it gives this woman comfort then that’s up to her,” the tweeter wrote before helpfully sharing her own thoughts: “Not for me tho.”
Indeed.
Pink is seen shaking her hands off slightly after the incident. If she needs some tips on cleanup, she could take a cue from the House of Mouse, which is apparently a popular place for stealth ash spreadings, no matter how hard they try to discourage it: According to the Wall Street Journal, Disneyland janitors discreetly call for a “HEPA cleanup” when they discover human remains (not if, when) and use a special filtered vacuum for thorough cleanup. If you’re yearning to have one specific ride ruined for you, the anonymous janitors told the outlet that the Haunted Mansion attraction is the most popular place in the park for discreet memorials, saying that it “probably has so much human ashes in it that it’s not even funny.”
A rep for Pink did not immediately return Vanity Fair‘s request for comment.