Tito, hand me a tissue!
I know, I already have the express pass to hell.
Way back in time when my sister was less psycho crackhead (well, less crackhead anyway....), George Michael wasn't sexing himself up and passing out in Land Rovers, Michael Jackson was Awe. Some. and McCauley Caulkin was but a zygote.
You know you spent more than one afternoon painstakingly learning The Thriller Dance. The wolfish raised arms to the side part, the scrapey foot in front while doing the sideways head bop part and the impossible turn and step to your right while doing tiny little pelvic thrust maneuver. I was pretty good at it if I was one of the backup zombies where looking stiff and disjointed added to my overall performance.
And I seem to remember an entire, glorious, weekend spent at Nickie Patrick's house where she choreographed a truly awesome baton routine to PYT. Yeah, that song got pretty creepy in the 90s.....
I was a Wham! girl, though. I was all about Wham! and Culture Club, my taste in swanky gay Brits was established early on, surprisingly influenced by my father. In perhaps his one good parenting move he took me to Sears (god, remember when Sears sold record albums?!) to buy the Quiet Riot album I could not live without. As we stood there in line at the Sears in the Concord Mall my dad flipped the record over and looked at the song titles. Loves a WHAT? Bitch? Cum on..WHAT? This was unacceptable! I was nine, I just thought they were lousy spellers.
He dragged me right out of the queue and back to the records to put it back. He was huffing and puffing at the salesman about how there was no way he was going to buy THAT for his little girl. There was a huge Boy George poster on display and I remember him saying "Who is that? Is she any good? Yeah? She's not dirty? Great, give me that poster and that album." The middle aged man happily picked them out and rang us up and 25 years later I still love me a big old nelly Brit.
But my sister was all about Michael Jackson. She had the yellow sweater poster, you know the one with the yellow bow tie? She used to sing Ben and Rockin' Robin all the time. She also had one of those cheesy Tiger Beat magazine faux scrapbooks and it was a prized possession. Interestingly enough, her next huge crush was Corey "wanna be Michael Jackson" Feldman! I guess she had a type, too.
Fighting with my sister when we still had to live in the same state house was pretty much constant. She would pick at me behind my mother's back until I just lost my shit and then I would get in trouble. And she was quick to get physically violent and even though I was much taller and two years older, she was crazier and meaner. So I had to be sneakier to get to her, something that was rare because I was too quick to fly off the handle. But really, you would be, too if you'd been stuck with her.
She did something to me, I don't remember what it was, but I was obviously quite upset about it. Upset enough to search out all the leftover wallet size photos from my third grade pictures, some scissors, and a bottle of Elmer's glue I took her beloved scrapbook to the basement one afternoon and set to work. I spent hours cutting out a pile of my heads from the picture packet and then carefully pasted them next to her beloved Michael in every photo where he was with a date and let it dry so the pages were not glued together. Then I cleaned it all up and put the book back where she had it and waited.
It took weeks for her to see it and lose her shit for a change, but they were sweet weeks filled with anticipation knowing that I was going to get her and get her good.
It was worth it. Honestly, it's one of the fondest memories of my childhood.
So, to you MJ, before the cheese slid off your cracker, you were pretty cool and I recreate that happy afternoon using a snapshot from homecoming 1990:
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