3. continue to teach the moonwalk

When I found out Michael Jackson had died I was driving on Downing Street in Denver, Colorado. A few seconds after I hung up the phone I pulled up next to a white Isuzu Trooper at a stoplight on Speer. The twenty something girl in the Trooper was smiling at my dog in the passenger seat as he rested his head on the window frame and gazed out at her. The girl and I made eye contact and I, in a need to share the moment with someone, impulsively yelled out across the seat, “I can’t believe about Michael Jackson.” She yelled back, “I know, I know! It’s so awful.”

It is so awful that Jackson, at 50, should die in the presence of his own doctor, leaving behind his three children, with Neverland Ranch no longer his and a come back tour only weeks away. Over the last several years I’ve had more than my fair share of conversations with people, mostly with those in older generations, about him–specifically his personal life and the significance of it on his professional legacy. From a troubling upbringing and an abusive father to the smothering public eye and media scrutiny, for someone of his icon status it would have been impossible for him not to have shown the signs of strain, sadness and alienation–he became a product of what we made him. Michael was the original lost boy.

Today, the day Michael Jackson died, was also the day Farrah Fawcett died. Two days before their deaths Ed McMahon died.