It was an unexpected moment for a teenager at a Pink concert in Brisbane, Australia on Monday when the singer stopped her concert to come and give her a hug.
Video shows Pink reading a sign handed to her from the crowd.
“Her name’s Leah, she’s 14, she lost her mom last month,” Pink reads to the packed crowd at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre.
Leah Murphy also wrote on the sign that she’d “love a hug,” which is what Pink did.
“She came down the stairs and gave me a big, long hug,” Leah told the Courier-Mail.
WATCH: B.C. girl sings with Pink
“You’re going to be OK,” she says on the video after hugging the 14-year-old, to which Leah responds, “thank you.”
It was Leah’s mom, Debbie, who was the reason why she was in the audience in the first place. She bought the tickets to Pink’s Sydney show and was going to go with a friend, but when she died last month, Leah decided to go in her place because she had bonded with her mother over Pink’s music.
She told the Courier-Mail her mother had downloaded all of Pink’s songs and would then play them “really loud” on speakers and the pair would sing and dance around the house.
Her planned trip to the Sydney concert didn’t go as planned, however, as Pink had to cancel the show due to illness.
Katrina Donkin, Leah’s aunt, scrambled to try and get tickets for the Brisbane show. CBS News reports she even “spammed” the singer, her backup dancer and others on social media to “get a message of love to Leah,” but when she didn’t receive any response, she made the sign that would later be read by Pink, along with other signs.
In addition, the pair almost didn’t make the concert when Donkin told the Australian Broadcasting Company she realized the tickets had been left at home in Cairns, more than 1,680 kilometres away. She called her neighbour who “broke into my house,” then handed them to someone she knew who worked for Qantas Airways. The employee then asked the pilots of a flight arriving in Brisbane the day of the concert if they could bring the tickets.
“They hand-delivered them to me,” she said. “I went back out to the airport and the captain walked off and gave me an envelope.”
While they stood in the crowd, Donkin said the audience helped grab Pink’s attention.
“Strangers in the crowd grabbed the signs and we waved them frantically whenever she looked over our way,” she said. “Until she squinted and said, ‘OK what is that?'”
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When Pink came down to hug and speak with Leah, the 14-year-old told her how much her mom loved her.
Donkin said the singer told Leah, “you’re pretty — oh don’t cry — it’s going to be OK.”
They took selfies together and Leah got autographs from Pink before she returned to the stage to finish the show.
“She is so heartbroken,” Donkin said. “But since the concert, she hasn’t stopped smiling and singing.
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