This looks to be a big summer for Marnée, Fort Wayne’s child prodigy who at 14 is almost old enough to swap “child prodigy” for a phrase with a little more tread on it, like “rising star.”

If the forthcoming music festival season goes as well as it seems like it’s about to, 2012 will be “the year of Marnée,” in the words of a young agent with William Morris who has taken on Marnée’s career on a sort of trial basis, according to Marnée’s dad, Tom Shaffer.

This young agent is just one of the cast members in the Marnée mix working gratis (for now): There’s also “Marvin,” a New York entertainment attorney; Artie Kornfeld, the founder of the original Woodstock festival; uberblogger Perez Hilton; rocker Pat Benatar; and whatever demented genius came up with a bizarre concept called “glamping.”

Marnée, a singer, songwriter and guitar whiz who has been wowing local audiences in Fort Wayne since she was 10, will open for Benatar in Hammond in late July.

She says she used to sing songs by Benatar on the karaoke machine at home when she was a kid (meaning all of six years ago). She just didn’t know she was singing Benatar’s songs.

When she found out she’d gotten the gig, she went on the Internet to research Benatar and found out she already knew a lot about her.

“I kept saying, ‘Oh I didn’t know she did that song. I love that song,’ ” Marnée recalls.

Among Marnée’s other summer concerts is an appearance arranged by Marvin at a music festival called Escape to New York.

It’ll happen in Southampton in early August, and Patti Smith and the Psychedelic Furs are the scheduled headliners.

Some of the more well-to-do attendees will pay thousands of dollars to partake of “glamping,” which is a mash-up of the phrase “glamorous camping,” Shaffer says.

Glamping somehow combines “roughing it” with “living it up” – 5-star service under the stars.

Because some of those glampers are likely to be music industry bigwigs on the lookout for new talent like Marnée, we probably should not be too quick to dismiss glamping.

As for Kornfeld, he featured Marnée on the May 3 edition of his radio show (hear it at www.artistfirst.com/woodstocknation.htm) and then invited her to be part of his Woodstock reboot called “The Spirit of Peace & Music Festival.” It happens Aug. 20 in Freeport, Ill.

There is something else in the works, but I am not allowed to say anything about it except I am sure it doesn’t involve anyone who would have any reason to bear ill will toward Lance Armstrong.

If you are one of those people who haven’t been keeping up with Marnée’s music career, here are a few highlights: Marnée was coached and then introduced by Stephen Stills at the grand opening of Lucas Oil Stadium (“It was like a daydream,” she says of the experience. “Talking to (Stills) was very weird, very surreal. I talked to him like he was my best friend almost.”), and one of her videos was posted by Perez Hilton on his blog and subsequently received a favorable comment from Jewel.

Marnée is about to enter her freshman year at an arts-centric private high school locally, and she says if things go as planned, there will be no immediate reason to go on to college.

“I mean, I guess I have an idea about (what success looks like), but I like to go with the flow,” she says. “I would like to tour around the world – play every country. I think that would be awesome. I would definitely like to be at a place where I am playing for big crowds.

“I want my music to be heard,” Marnée says. “It’ll be hard, but I want my name to be a household name.”

Should that not happen in the next four years, Shaffer says he will gently urge his daughter in a more traditional direction.

“If she’s not big by the time she graduates from high school, I will encourage her to go to college,” he says. “If she doesn’t get a good level of success by the end of high school, I would hate for her to be playing in bars.”