One of Miley’s Dancing Bears Felt ‘Less Than Human’

SNL may have inadvertently hit the nail on the head with a joke in last week’s cold open featuring Miley Cyrus, in which a man in a giant teddy bear costume leaves rehearsal for Cyrus’s VMA appearance crying, “We shouldn’t be doing this!” Hollis Jane writes on her personal blog that she was one of the little people hired to dress up as a bear and dance behind Miley on stage at the VMAs—and the experience was one to forget. “I had never been in a performance where I was purely meant to be gawked at,” the 24-year-old wrote, recalling that she walked out of the first dress rehearsal at the Barclays Center shaking and crying. “I was being stared at and laughed at for all of the wrong reasons. I was being looked at as a prop...as something less than human.” Jane noted that the performance forced her to “draw my personal line in the sand,” prompting her to turn down an offer to join Miley on tour. “I wondered if it was worth feeling less than human again,” she wrote. “And frankly, it wasn’t.”