BRISBANE, Australia – While on tour in Australia, singer Pink stopped her Brisbane show Tuesday after noticing a girl in the audience holding a sign.
“My name is Leah – I’m 14 years old. I lost my beautiful Mom last month. I would LOVE a hug… Please!” the words read.
The 38-year-old singer didn’t hesitate to walk into the crowd and find the grieving girl, identified by Yahoo News Australia as Leah Murphy, of Queensland. Pink embraced her before leaving the young fan with a selfie and an autograph on her arm.
“I was crying a lot and Pink said, ‘Oh don’t cry, you look so pretty. Everything’s going to be okay.’ She was really nice. She’s really sweet,” Leah told Yahoo.
Leah and her mother, Debbie, bought tickets to go together, but Debbie died in June.
Leah’s aunt, Katrina Donkin, knew how much they used to love singing Pink’s music together, so she tried to set up a meeting during the show.
Katrina, Leah and other friends lofted the signs to grab Pink’s attention, but at first she couldn’t read them.
“I had strangers in the crowd grab them off us as well and start waving them,” Donkin told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “It was just enough for Pink to say, ‘what is that?’.”
In the end, the chance meeting worked out perfectly – but it almost never happened.
Donkin told ABC that she had forgotten the tickets at her home in Cairns, over a 1,000 miles away. It was the night before the show when she realized it, so she called her neighbor, who happens to work with Qantas Airways.
After breaking into Donkin’s home to retrieve the tickets, the neighbor “asked the pilots of a flight that arrived in Brisbane at lunch time if they could take them down and they said yes,” Donkin said. “They hand-delivered them to me … I went back out to the airport and the captain walked off and gave me an envelope.”
