Keep on With the Force, Don't Stop
Michael Jackson: I should have told you earlier, much earlier, that you inspired me to dance. Not professionally although I had entertained thoughts of that as well. But just to dance. Freely. Wholly. Without thinking about where my feet were leading. Without thinking about anything.
There’s VHS tape of an age 3 me dancing to Thriller in its entirety. My brother, a chubby infant, desperately tries to keep up. I take out the pacifier once in awhile to lip synch to “Billie Jean”. I was going to be a star! My whole family loved you. It goes without saying that I loved you the most.
I forgive you for terrifying me with your gaunt, bug-eyed pea-green undead face in the “Thriller” video. Visions of zombies at my window haunted me for way too long than its appropriate to admit. I had begged my father to rent the video and when he finally relented, I begged him to turn it off through my tears. My mother always explained it was just a mask, makeup. It wasn’t you. It always helped to watch the behind-the-scenes where the makeup artists caked you in the creepy paints and prosthetics while you laughed blithely.
I stuck with you through Bad and Dangerous, even when mom and dad said you were getting weirder with the elephant man’s bones, luminescent skin and all. We lost touch in 1994. I had a lot going on: puberty, boys, parent’s divorce, loss. But I’d hear your songs on the radio and always turn them up.
In college, you made a triumphant return. All those crazy kids loved dancing to your hits in the courtyard. And they did so sincerely without a petty, intellectual thought in their heads. That’s the best kind of dancing—when you get away from yourself but somehow become more “you” than you’ve ever been.
It’s true. I was never your biggest fan. But you were my first musical love, forever a part of my history.
When the news broke, I thought back to how you had sparked my initial love of dancing and how I can always depend on a few rhythmic steps to elevate my mood and make me feel like myself again. I am forever indebted to your otherworldly, impossibly awesome, incredibly soul-soaring, amazingly unbelievable, fancy-schmancy footwork. Without you, I might not have learned where your body can take you.
