You’d think that, with all that Britney Spears has been through over the past couple of years, the last thing that would bother her is a little smoke. Hell, we’re talking about someone who, based on past photographs, doesn’t have enough sense to keep her Marlboro Lights away from her kids.

At GM Place on Wednesday (April 8) though, the Queen of Southern Trailer Trash proved, yet again, that Lotusland and megastars don’t always mix.

As major scenes go, it wasn’t quite up there with Oasis stalking off the Pacific Coliseum stage after singer Liam Gallagher was pelted with a shoe, or skids doing their best to destroy GM Place after Guns N’ Roses cancelled. Evidently sick of the doobies and cancer sticks that the audience’s tweens were happily sharing with their chaperones, Mrs. Oops, I Did It Again decided that she and her crew had enough and walked off the stage.

What was interesting was that Spears, who has never had even the slightest ability to connect with a crowd, didn’t grab a microphone and explain what was going on. If the smoke is bothering you and your people, why not do what any normal person would do and tell the crowd to butt out? Hell, that’s what Madonna did last fall at B.C. Place when she bitched out people near the stage for puffing instead of dancing. That sort of invaluable interaction with an audience makes you seem like a real human being, rather than a prefabbed, past-your-pull-date pop automaton.

Instead, on this night, a robotic voice eventually announced that there was too much smoke in the air, and called for all burning substances to be extinguished. GM Place doors were then opened to clear out the rink.

The whole incident has been big news today, making headlines everywhere from perezhilton.com to TMZ to the Ukrainian Nanny News. What’s pathetic is that this is the best that Spears can do as far as giving the blogosphere something to talk about.

What happened to her shaving her head bald, flashing her cooch at anyone with camera, and laughing like a hyena while being carted off to the nuthouse? Not to mention going apeshit with umbrellas and, in a true testimony to the ass-backwards stupidity of anyone born in the South, driving around town with her kid on her lap rather than in the carseat where he belongs.

Spears finished the show by giving a whole lot of tweens something to remember their first concert by: their parents going sheet-white at her parting words of wisdom, namely, "Drive safe, don’t smoke weed and rock out with your cocks out! Peace motherfucker!". What the fuck, bitch! If you’re to try to convince us that we’re all at the Circus, don’t leave us with something that sounds like—the pot ’dis aside—it was cribbed from Up In Smoke Tour.

This morning the singer’s Web site announced the following: "We want to apologize to all the fans who attended our Vancouver show tonight for the brief pause in Britney’s set. Crew members above the stage became ill due to a ventilation issue."

Let’s hope those crew members aren’t working the upcoming Phish reunion shows.