All I can think about is my basement. The scratchy gray carpet against my bare feet as I tried to moonwalk across the tiny room. The pulsating sounds of “Billie Jean” drowning out the laundry machine and dryer. Mom calling me upstairs for dinner; my pleading, “Just five more minutes! Pleeeeeeeease!?!”
Just five more minutes.
It’s all I wanted. It’s all I still want.
My childhood idol, Michael Jackson, is dead. Did I just type that? Let me do it again to be sure. Michael Jackson is dead. My basement dance routine; my scratched up 45s; my studded glove; my beat. Gone.
Still in utter denial and unsure of what to do after the first reports started trickling in yesterday, I did what came most naturally: I put a copy of his re-mastered 25th Anniversary edition of “Thriller” in the CD drive of my computer and just let it play. Over and over. Because for me, Michael Jackson has always been – and will always be – about the music. Forget his weird vanity and health issues, his questionable religious beliefs; his affinity for animals; his humiliating public trial or any other wild thing the world and media have associated him with. Michael Jackson was a musical genius. Plain and simple. He was music. He was dance. He was entertainment.
And so I sat and smiled as “Billy Jean” took me back to the basement.
I smiled when “P.Y.T” and “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ñ” put me in my High School gymnasium, where during Freshman year’s Sportsnite competition I danced and sang on the “Moonwalk White” team against “Big League Blue.” We lost, but I left with a heightened sense of admiration for The Gloved One and an obsession with trying to spell “mamasay mamasa mama-coo sa.”
And then, of course, I smiled as the creaky door opened and the wolf howled in “Thriller.” The award winning, record-breaking, trend-starting song took on new meaning in my life as an adult, just two or three years ago. Having never truly mastered the graveyard routine when the 13-minute video came out in 1983 and I was just an impressionable five-year-old, I re-channeled my inner Michael at a special pre-Halloween dance class given at my gym. I learned the “Zombie Walk,” the “Shimmy Shake,” the “Hey Girl,” and my favorite, the “Crawl.” It was the most fun I’d ever (and probably will ever) have at the gym.
The following year, I did it again trying to break the Guinness World Record for most zombies dancing the routine in one location. In a torn-up Corpse Bride costume, with made-up sunken gray eyes and hairspray-hardened teased hair, I was the least scary “grizzly groul” ever – just by the mere fact that I couldn’t wipe the gigantic grin off my face.
And so beyond the tears of this most tragic loss, I smile. I play the music. I dance. I “Remember the Time…”