Breaking News
Talk about a news item.
News, for the most part, is boring. Just a lot of boring talk about boring people doing boring things. Things that, in Cordelia's opinion, have nothing to do with her, so why waste her precious time reading about it? Unless it's celebrity gossip. In that case, her stance on the subject is: more, please.
Some news, however, manages to transcend categorization. Some news is so big, so important, that it doesn't matter who you are, where you are, or even what language you speak. It will find you, and it will make an impact on you that you'd never expected. It will be the kind of news that, years later, you will still remember where you were when you heard it. Like the Kennedy assassination (Cordelia wasn't born yet, but her parents would always talk about it, even though they'd both only been in grade school when it happened) or 9/11 (Cordelia was trapped in Pylea, but she still remembers when she first heard about it upon returning to LA).
When Cordelia finally got back to her life, away from rehab and her 3-month (voluntary) imprisonment as an oracle, she wasn't that eager to find out what she'd missed in world events. Her phone was dead, so she had to wait for it to charge to check her messages, so in the meantime, she turned on the television. Not really all that interested, just to have something to make noise in the condo and keep the memories at bay. it hadn't taken long for her channel surfing to land on the latest news flash, though. Because even though the event itself was nearly a week old, it was still news. No, not news. This was bigger than news.
Michael Jackson was dead.
And with him, a big part of her childhood.
Sure, he'd turned into kind of a weirdo. But in his prime, he'd been a musical genius, and Cordelia lost track of how many numbers her dance squad had choreographed to one of his songs. She'd even had a little crush on him when she was little. (She had a sequined glove, too.) She knew all of his songs by heart (the older ones, at least. After Bad, she started to get too old to think he was cool).
It was inconceivable that he was gone, even though he'd kind of already been gone for years. This was a different kind of gone. This was the kind of gone that made her suddenly nostalgic for the 80s. That made her download half of his library off of iTunes because she'd lost all her cassettes ages ago, and besides, who had a tape player anymore? She hadn't had any desire to listen to his music in over a decade, yet here she was, devouring it all over again. Singing to it and dancing the old dances like she was right back there in the dance squad days. Watching the "Thriller" video on YouTube and TiVo-ing every news special she could find. It was cool to like Michael Jackson again.
Death, it turned out, was the ultimate comeback.
She cried when she watched the funeral. Bawled her eyes out when Brooke Shields spoke, and when Jermaine Jackson sang. And then at the end, when his daughter broke down... well, she was a goner then.
She could be such a sap sometimes. And she felt kind of bad now for teasing her mother so much when she'd get nostalgic about Elvis Presley. Now she understood. It wasn't so much the man himself she was mourning, it was the magic of the era, when she was young and carefree. Everyone's childhood has a soundtrack, even if they don't really think much about it. And a major part of hers had been Michael Jackson, who was now gone.
God, what was she going to do when Madonna died?
News, for the most part, is boring. Just a lot of boring talk about boring people doing boring things. Things that, in Cordelia's opinion, have nothing to do with her, so why waste her precious time reading about it? Unless it's celebrity gossip. In that case, her stance on the subject is: more, please.
Some news, however, manages to transcend categorization. Some news is so big, so important, that it doesn't matter who you are, where you are, or even what language you speak. It will find you, and it will make an impact on you that you'd never expected. It will be the kind of news that, years later, you will still remember where you were when you heard it. Like the Kennedy assassination (Cordelia wasn't born yet, but her parents would always talk about it, even though they'd both only been in grade school when it happened) or 9/11 (Cordelia was trapped in Pylea, but she still remembers when she first heard about it upon returning to LA).
When Cordelia finally got back to her life, away from rehab and her 3-month (voluntary) imprisonment as an oracle, she wasn't that eager to find out what she'd missed in world events. Her phone was dead, so she had to wait for it to charge to check her messages, so in the meantime, she turned on the television. Not really all that interested, just to have something to make noise in the condo and keep the memories at bay. it hadn't taken long for her channel surfing to land on the latest news flash, though. Because even though the event itself was nearly a week old, it was still news. No, not news. This was bigger than news.
Michael Jackson was dead.
And with him, a big part of her childhood.
Sure, he'd turned into kind of a weirdo. But in his prime, he'd been a musical genius, and Cordelia lost track of how many numbers her dance squad had choreographed to one of his songs. She'd even had a little crush on him when she was little. (She had a sequined glove, too.) She knew all of his songs by heart (the older ones, at least. After Bad, she started to get too old to think he was cool).
It was inconceivable that he was gone, even though he'd kind of already been gone for years. This was a different kind of gone. This was the kind of gone that made her suddenly nostalgic for the 80s. That made her download half of his library off of iTunes because she'd lost all her cassettes ages ago, and besides, who had a tape player anymore? She hadn't had any desire to listen to his music in over a decade, yet here she was, devouring it all over again. Singing to it and dancing the old dances like she was right back there in the dance squad days. Watching the "Thriller" video on YouTube and TiVo-ing every news special she could find. It was cool to like Michael Jackson again.
Death, it turned out, was the ultimate comeback.
She cried when she watched the funeral. Bawled her eyes out when Brooke Shields spoke, and when Jermaine Jackson sang. And then at the end, when his daughter broke down... well, she was a goner then.
She could be such a sap sometimes. And she felt kind of bad now for teasing her mother so much when she'd get nostalgic about Elvis Presley. Now she understood. It wasn't so much the man himself she was mourning, it was the magic of the era, when she was young and carefree. Everyone's childhood has a soundtrack, even if they don't really think much about it. And a major part of hers had been Michael Jackson, who was now gone.
God, what was she going to do when Madonna died?