Packing for a trip with little kids is never simple. Packing for a world tour with 5-year-old twin girls is a whole other level.
In March 2014, Lisa Marie Presley was getting ready to take her music to Australia. Lisa Marie was Elvis Presley’s only child, and by then she was a singer with three albums of her own. She was 46, and she was touring her third album, “Storm & Grace.”
She hadn’t played shows in Australia since 2006. So before she left, she called a reporter from The Canberra Times from Los Angeles, on a break from rehearsals, to talk about the trip.
If you’ve never heard Lisa Marie talk about her own music, this short film made for “Storm & Grace” lets you hear her describe the album she carried on that tour.
Lisa Marie Presley talks about her album “Storm & Grace”
The tour plan was set. The Australian dates started at the Hornsby RSL club near Sydney on March 19, 2014. A few days later, on March 23, she’d play the Southern Cross Club in Woden, Canberra.
And Lisa Marie wasn’t going alone. Her twin daughters, Harper and Finley, were coming too. The paper put it plainly: “The twins will be with her on the tour too. That’s non-negotiable.”
On the twins coming along, Lisa Marie was just as sure. “Absolutely. They are never far.”
Her oldest daughter, Riley Keough, then 24, made the trip to Australia as well.
That’s where the packing comes in.
Lisa Marie told the reporter the family had been packing that very day. She gave the girls one simple rule about their dress-up clothes. Finley had other ideas, and she didn’t argue. She negotiated.
Here’s the whole story in Lisa Marie’s own words.
“In fact today, we were packing and I said, ‘OK, you can pick out two princess dresses because we’re going to be dragging them all over the world’. And Finley was like, ‘OK, but I need my crown and my earrings’. And she had to have her high heel shoes. She loves to run in high heel shoes. It’s so funny, she’s such a little girl. Harper is the same. They’re amazing.”
A crown, earrings and high heels to run around in. Finley knew exactly what a princess needs on the road. And her sister was no different.
Lisa Marie clearly adored them. Talking about the twins in the same interview, she said “they’re the cutest little things. They’re so full of energy. They just light up wherever they are, they just light up everyone. They’re just little beacons of light in everyone’s life,” and it’s easy to tell how proud she was.
Here’s a look at Lisa Marie and the twins when they were featured among Hollywood’s cutest kids by Access Hollywood and People.
Lisa Marie Presley and her twin girls on Access Hollywood
Once the family landed, a Sydney news report said Lisa Marie spent a day at Taronga Zoo with Harper and Finley, then 5, and Riley before the Hornsby show.
Then came the funny part.
That night at Hornsby, Lisa Marie walked out in a long black gown. And her feet were bare.
She laughed about it with the crowd. “I made a mistake… I came out here with no shoes, I thought there was carpet. So if I slip, I slip”.
So the little girl who wouldn’t travel without her high heels had a mom who walked on stage with no shoes at all.