Colleen Ballinger as Miranda. Image from MirandaSings.com
By Kim Kalunian, WPRO Arts and Entertainment
Colleen Ballinger has made good on being bad. The 26-year-old Santa Barbara native has become a YouTube sensation for her parody, Miranda Sings – an overly confident singer who never seems to realize she’s out of tune and out of her mind.
Ballinger posted her first Miranda Sings video on YouTube back in 2008 when she was a senior in college. A vocal performance major who had been performing since the age of 10, Ballinger was fascinated by the new internet platform that people were using to promote themselves and their sometimes terrible singing.
A year later, Ballinger’s videos went viral and today her YouTube page has more than 36 million views.
“My career is making videos,” Ballinger told WPRO in a telephone interview Thursday. She said “never in a million years” did she think a silly YouTube video of her “acting like a goofball” would get her to where she is today: touring the world with a one-woman variety show.
“If someone had told me when I made that video it was going to be popular or make [me] famous…I would not believe you,” she said.
Ballinger, who’s done a variety of musical theater shows and a stint at Disneyland, thought she would be an actress or a choral teacher. Instead, she’s performed in London, Australia, Canada and across the U.S. as both Miranda and herself.
“It blows my mind,” she said.
Ballinger said Miranda is “an imitation of very cocky, untalented, rude girls on the internet.” She wears a signature, baggy button-down shirt and pulls her dark hair tightly back from her forehead. But perhaps the most iconic piece of Miranda’s image is her bright red, over-applied lipstick.
Ballinger said she uses the cheapest brand of red lipstick she can find when she becomes Miranda. Why?
“It stains your skin,” she said, noting the cheap kind removes more easily. “After shows and after I make videos I find that I have a red mustache.”
Miranda likes to wear her lipstick almost to her nose. Making a quick switch from Colleen, Miranda chimed in about her favorite brand of gloss: “Well I just borrow it from my mom…but it has to be red”
Ballinger said she tried to make Miranda as unlikeable as possible. The idea worked, as people on YouTube bought in to Ballinger’s stick and shared the video of the utterly untalented but overly confident girl on the screen.
“It’s so easy for people to hate someone or something,” said Ballinger.
But now people love Miranda. They imitate her, dress as her for Halloween and go to her shows. Ballinger will take stage tonight as both Miranda and herself at the Community College of Rhode Island. She’ll sing a bit (both badly and well), do some magic tricks, invite audience members on to the stage and tell some jokes.
In addition to travelling the world, Ballinger said she’s gotten to do some other fun things like guest star on the Nickelodeon show “Victorious.”
“Every single day I wake up and I can’t believe this is what I get to do,” she said.
It’s not a bad for a girl who describes what she does as wearing a lot of lipstick and singing badly.
Some of Miranda’s most popular videos are her cover of Katie Perry’s “California Girls” and LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It” which have a combined five million views. There’s another video of Ballinger and her alter-ego Miranda singing together.
But Miranda said if she could do a duet with anyone in the world, it would a very simple choice: “If I could do a duet with anyone it would definitely be myself because I’m the most talented, famous, attractive performer in the world so of course I want to do a duet with myself. That would be amazing.”
Ballinger will perform tonight, Friday, March 22 at 7:30 p.m. at the Bobby Hacket Theater at CCRI’s Warwick Campus. For more show dates and information, visit MirandaSings.com.
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Kim Kalunian
