Brad Lovell/Iconic EntertainmentWhen two-time nominee Kelsea Ballerini hits the red carpet Wednesday night at the CMA Awards, she’ll have two very special things with her: a pretty dress and a very special date.
Kelsea has invited 17-year-old Allie Allen, a cancer patient at St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis, to join her for the evening. The two first met at the hospital a while back, when Allie was 16, and Kelsea found her so inspiring that they kept in touch. “Since then her mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and she was re-diagnosed and it spread to full brain and spine,” Kelsea explains. “She starts chemo in, like, two or three weeks and so she has this little break in the middle and she is coming with me to the CMAs.”
“We’re getting her my stylist who’s picking dresses for her and my makeup girl’s doing her makeup,” Kelsea adds. “And she’s had to miss days of high school and she’s had to miss that stuff. And that’s not fair, so it’s my first CMA Awards and I think that it is only right to share it with her.”
Kelsea’s up for Best New Artist and Female Vocalist of the Year, and she says she doesn’t expect to win that second one at all. “I’m new. I’m a baby artist,” she says. “And…Female is like, those are all women that I look up to so much. And Carrie and Miranda and Lee Ann Womack, like, I grew up listening to them! So, it just makes me excited to be a female and to have music out right now. I mean, seriously, I just want to put on a pretty dress and go sit down [at the show].”
And speaking of that pretty dress, Kelsea’s found the perfect one, and she’s waited her whole life for this moment. “When I was little, I played dress-up. I love getting all dolled up, it’s so fun!” she says. “And so, I have this dress…as soon as I saw it, I was like, ‘That’s my dress!’ And it’s, like, a fairy princess dress.”
She laughs, “It’s my first CMA Awards, so I wanna have a poufy dress!”
You never know: Kelsea and her poufy dress may just surprise everybody by winning Wednesday night at the CMA Awards, which air live on ABC at 8 p.m. ET.
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