To celebrate our upgrade to Windows 3.1 in the early nineties, my dad bought this karaoke program for the PC.  It included a microphone and came loaded with a few random songs, like Yankee Doodle and Dust in the Wind, and then he bought two “expansion” packs - Frank Sinatra, and Michael Jackson. (Do we see a pattern here? That my parents endured constant singing for nearly two decades? Man, I was annoying.)

The Michael Jackson karaoke cd had a couple songs I didn’t recognize, deeper cuts off the Thriller album. You know people have been coming out with these poetic stories about how they first heard Thriller, how they bought it the day it came out, how it blew their minds? I bought Thriller because I wanted to know how the songs went, so I could sing them on karaoke. This doesn’t exactly score me any cool points. To be fair, that album came out before I was born, and I should give myself credit for paying heed to a musical masterpiece while my classmates were touting the greatness of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.

Then, of course, Dangerous came out, which many people forget about, but WHICH WAS AWESOME. Pretty sure me and Emily Friar warped both copies of our cassettes on that one.  How many times did we play this song from Free Willy, Em? My estimate: Eleventy Billion.

Every Day of 1992:

Dad: Will you please pick another song to sing?

Me: What?

Dad: I’ve had enough of that song for today.

Me: What song?

Dad: The one about the River Jordan!!!

To Part IV

In the summer of 1989, we were in the process of moving from my parents’ first home on Brookhollow to the house where I’d do the rest of my growing up. The old house was sold and the new house was still a few weeks from being finished, so we lived in a borrowed RV. (I often refer to this time period as “That Summer We Lived in a Trailer.”)  What was likely a nuisance for my parents was to me a huge adventure.  I lived to be outside, riding my bike and dancing in the gravel driveway.  (That gravel got a lot of my blood and tears that summer, but I loved it.)

I had one year of dance classes under my belt and had just discovered my sense of rhythm.  After a few years of walking into walls and a few scary tumbles off the school bus, my mother sought the advice of my pediatrician.  “There’s something wrong with my daughter,” she had said.  My doctor suggested a way to actively develop some motor skills. “Put her in gymnastics,” he recommended.  “Dear God, no. She’ll kill herself,” my mother retorted.  “Maybe something creative? She sings, all the time. ALL THE TIME.”  It was true.  “Dance, then?” the doctor suggested.  And so it began.

I shuffle-ballchanged into the world of dance, hoping that someday I’d be as good as my teachers, who performed a routine to “Smooth Criminal” at that year’s recital. I think that’s why my parents ended up buying me Bad that summer. Plus, CDs were still considered new, so it was probably slim pickins at the ol’  Sound of Music. Plus, my older cousins liked it, so it was probably what they thought was “hip.”  Plus, my love of the Beatles at that time was probably bordering on obsessive, so they were likely seeking relief from hearing the  “Help!” album on loop, seven times a day.

Still, I’m sure my parents were thinking more “Ben” MJ than “Bad” MJ.  That was the day of lyrics printed in liner notes, and I poured over them. They scoffed at the line “Your butt is mine” and they didn’t really approve of that “Dirty Diana” song (which of course then became one of my favorites). They could have done without all of the crotch-grabbing, the pelvic-thrusting.  Too young to watch MTV,  I somehow snuck a glimpse at the Smooth Criminal dance sequence. It was like discovering for the very first time was “cool” was.

The decision was made. That. I wanna do THAT.

So I started choreographing in my living room, whereby “choreographing” I mean jumping around and singing and maybe leaping from time to time. I didn’t have a fedora, but by god, I had a cowboy hat. And that winter, my mother thought she was losing her mind, constantly having to search for the companion to one of her white sparkly isotoner gloves.

To Part III

My first memories regarding Michael Jackson are those I recorded when I was five. I had this Fisher Price cassette player that I lugged around constantly. It had a microphone and recording capability, so I spent a lot of time conducting captivating interviews with my dog and singing loudly to the point of distortion, which, you know, was NOT ANNOYING AT ALL.  Anyway, I have tapes and tapes of audio footage containing nothing but me watching TV. Commenting on what I was watching on TV.  Does that surprise you? It was basically my first blog –  even at five, I had opinions on things, and assumed that people needed to know about them.  One morning, after I sang along to the opening theme of Fraggle Rock and screamed devoutly, “I LOOOOOVE FRAGGLE ROCK!”, an ad came on for a Jackson 5 greatest hits album.  There, gleaming in innocence and youth, was the 70s Michael Jackson.

It’s important to note that it was 1987, Bad-era Michael Jackson.

This recording makes it apparent that my five-year-old brain could not connect the two. “Who is that?” I asked my mother. “That’s Michael Jackson,” you can hear my mom say from the back of the room.  Confused, I stutter “But…but she looks like a boy!”  [Oh, to have seen my mother's face.] “Well…He is a boy. That’s him, when he was little.”  In the silence that follows you can hear my little mind getting blown. From my understanding — long hair + high voice = woman.  Michael Jackson was a woman, a woman named Michael, which yeah, is weird, but no weirder than “Raffi” or “Ringo.”  It’s also possible that I had been confusing him with Janet Jackson that whole time.  When I had been bugging my parents for a new “compact disc,” it’s plausible that I really just wanted a copy of Control.

But on my sixth birthday, she bought me a copy of Bad, instead. Pretty sure I kept forgetting that Michael was a dude, but it didn’t matter –  that album kicked my kindergartner ass. I never went back to Raffi after that.

To Part II