Remembering Michael Jackson

So I know that Michael Jackson turned into kind of a freak, but watching the Memorial services today I thought back to my "Michael Jackson Moments".

Probably the most memorable MJ moment came from his song "we are the world" that he participated in alog with a bunch of other artists. It was circa 1987, the Lloyd family and the Clarke family were on vacation together in Black Butte Oregon. The Kids in the family, Katie and I for the Lloyd's and Monika and Gavin for the Clarke's had planned a beautiful choreographed lip synch to "we are the world". Katie - if you have a picture of our outfit's, please send it to me, because you really need a visual for how horrible these were....shiny lavender/purple short shors, and mesh...yes I said MESH white tops. We performed our lip synch/dance several times for our parents, Gavin was not really into it, so he sat behind us on the floor and was our "light guy", in that he had to reach up and turn on/off the light. Well as the youngest of the group, he didn't exactly do a great job and that warranted a whack in the head by his big sister and a fight ensued where Gavin accused Monika of giving him a bald spot. Mom/Dad...I hope you got to have a lot of cocktails before watching that tragic display of entertainment.

Fast forward to 2001, I was supposed to be living in New York City for a month doing a project for the Hyatt, well, I decided to accept a job and move to NYC so I had moved into the hotel from my friends apartment until my belongings moved from San Francisco. One of the doorman at the hotel said to me one day "I have a Michael Jackson ticket for sale for his 30th anniversary concert at Madison Square Garden..are you interested?" I really was not a huge MJ fan (see story above...I was traumatized), but there were a lot of big names that would be doing tribute numbers - including MJ himself. The concert ran on 2 nights, September 9th and September 10th. Well, I heard that those kind New Yorkers were upset at the first concert because of long set changes between acts, so they made some changes and added video vignets in between acts for the night I went. The video vignets were actually really cool, because they showed MJ in the 1980's and what a world pop star he was and the charities that he was involved in and the people that he was helping. The concert was really cool, I had total nosebleed seats that were practically behind the stage, so I wandered around and snaked a seat just above the floor and sat there the whole time! The picture above is from the concert, the highlight was that MJ split his pants doing the splits. LOL. I left the concert late that night, and had a very peaceful feeling after watching all of those videos about healing the world etc. etc. I had to work at 6am the next day, September 11, 2001. I couldn't help but get caught up in the irony of the change a day made...we went from healing the world to one of the most tragic days in our Country's history.