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The final concert--Michael Jackson's sendoff
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Celebrity in America is strange and even stranger in death. You would think Michael Jackson had kicked off his tour. Over a 
million people tried to get tickets for the Stapleton Center in LA. Scalpers were already at work for the coveted eleven thousand seats inside the arena with another eight thousand having to watch it across the street on close circuit television. What are the people coming to see? Stevie Wonder? Other celebrities? To pay their respects to a man they knew through music and images? Maybe all of the above.
But it doesn't matter. We see the power of a wired world at events like this. Michael Jackson had been MIA for a long time after the...trial. A Senator recently called him a pervert and didn't understand what all the hoopla was about. Obviously the Senator had never heard Ben or ABC listened to Man in the Mirror or watched the famed Thriller video. Nor did he understand the man who saw himself like Peter Pan and hid out in Neverland and then finally Bahrain. Celebradom gives us few moments that stand up well to the light in death.
But the people are coming. I remember growing up and seeing Michael Jackson in teen magazines along with Donny Osmond. They were at the top of the teen pyramid. Young, rich, famous, and in rock bands. It did not get any better than that. We were a long way away from strange plastic surgery and accusations of strange relationships with children. And his songs were on the radio. Donny fell by the wayside with his toothy Mormon smile but Michael...he just took off.
And so he came of age in the eighties when life was good. MTV launched Michael into the stratosphere and his sense of cool became our sense of cool. Even the androgyny he promoted in his changing visage became part of our culture. Michael looked cool for a long time before veering into the uncool land of weird and then just strange. But we hung in there right up to that trial and then he just disappeared and the economy tanked and we just lost site of that whole era.
So maybe this is what the Senator is really missing. Maybe the glorious thing about death is that we rewind back to the very best of a person. Your mistakes should not be your legacy in the long road that is a life. That was toward the end and nobody can stay on top forever. So we remember Michael Jackson as the guy who moonwalked his way to Super Star Status. The kid who peered at us from teen magazines. The man who struggled through the hell of adulthood just like the rest of us.
I see now I should have got a ticket for the final concert, but there were only so many. The best I can do now is think back to when I first saw you in that teen magazine and it was all in front of us...well, so long friend.
William Hazelgrove writes in Ernest Hemingway's attic. His latest book is Rocket Man.
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