Lightbulb Over Head Blog

Does the world really need another article about the death of Michael Jackson?

Probably not, yet here I am on the eve of his memorial service and I can’t get him out of my head.

Earlier today, my cousin, Wendi, suggested that I tackle this complex, over exposed topic and ever since, I’ve been wondering what I could possibly contribute to this massive international dialogue.

The day Michael Jackson died, I was at my family reunion in Tennessee. In one of the few and far between moments when my golf and LSU Baseball-crazed cousins weren’t hogging the television to watch sporting events, the news of Michael Jackson’s heart attack flashed across the screen. I paused, unable to register what I was hearing. The rest of my family went about their business drinking a glasses of chardonnay, piecing together jigsaw puzzles, or reading quietly by lamplight.

“Michael Jackson? What? How? What? The Michael Jackson is dead?” My voice was high and squirrelly as I looked around the room for a response.

My father was the only one to take note of my outburst. He was reclining on a large, white, leather couch with his feet up on a pillow. He chewed on the inside of his mouth, making the familiar sucking noises that accompanied this strange habit. “Yup,” he simply said as he starred up at the screen.

The rest of the room remained the same. The news correspondent explained that Jackson had collapsed in his home earlier in the day due to a heart attack and could not be resuscitated at the hospital.

Make no mistake, I was shocked by this news.

But:

A few minutes later I was cutting myself a piece of pineapple upside down cake and life was continuing as usual.

I have an odd sense of detachment from this event. I’ve felt like a fly on the wall for the last two weeks with no relation to the giant emotional upheaval that’s been going on regarding the loss of this celebrity. On one hand, I see Michael Jackson, pop sensation and dance visionary, and on the other hand I see Michael Jackson, probable (yet unproven) pedophile and plastic surgery addict. I just can’t reconcile the two images I have in my head. Its like I’m watching him split into two entirely different people every time I watch a televised documentary of his life. He was some kind of bizarre, freaky genius. I suppose it makes sense that a recipe that unstable was bound to explode at some point.

In the weeks following Michael’s death, I received messages on Facebook from random people announcing that “Michael never touched those kids. If you had a son and you truly thought he’d been sexually abused, would you settle for cash or see the deviant put behind bars where he belonged?” My immediate response was that I would see him put behind bars. However, I can imagine if I were a private person and my face and my son’s face were being plastered in all of the tabloids that it would wear on me emotionally and physically. It must have been a terribly stressful ordeal for the mother of Jordan Chandler and if she was offered an unimaginable sum of money from the King of Pop, I could imagine how she might have brought herself to take it as a means of getting her family out of the spotlight and away from the scandal.

It cannot be denied that Michael was an addictive man. From the augmentation of his skin color and facial reconstruction to his publicity stunts, he lived for the lime light. Despite his famous song’s title, it did matter to him if he was black or white, or at least it seemed to, based on the physical evidence. At the age of 50, his eyes were pretty much the only recognizable feature linking him to his birth-given face. He went from revolutionizing the dance and music video industry to jumping on the hood of his limo before a court appearance. For me, he reached the limit when he hung his baby out of a hotel window in Berlin. In the pictures, his face is oddly excited, mouth wide to accept the shouts and protests from below as if they fell on his ears like praise, his eyes slightly deranged.

It makes me sad to see this plethora of misplaced showmanship when I think back on this man’s remarkable life. He was so talented and inspired so many people that he really didn’t need any of these desperate plays for attention.

Tonight I watched the coverage of MJ’s memorial service on VH1 with my friend, Greg. Besides the fact that we were surprised by Brooke Shields’ description of her close friendship with Michael (Who knew?), the evening was filled with adulation for Michael as a friend and artist. Even his friend’s questioned some of his minor eccentricities. My favorite example of this was when Shields described when she had asked Jackson, “What’s with the glove?” Between speeches, those in attendance yelled and shouted in worship to their fallen king and idol. It only took a changing slide to set them off repeatedly and unstoppably. It is undeniable that Michael left behind millions of fans world wide. More than all of the scandal and speculation about his eccentric life, Michael was an innovator, and more importantly, and inspiration.

That was his greatest gift. For the last two weeks there has been an outpouring of dancers and singers who all swear they started learning their craft because of watching Michael Jackson perform. That is Jackson’s true legacy.

I hope that is what people remember in years to come. I hope dancers learn to moon walk and I hope music videos get bigger and better at story telling. I hope children watch videos of The Jackson 5 and believe that their dreams are possible. Where is there love for music and dance, Jackson will be there to continue to inspire.

“Maybe it’s just my time to get plastic surgery.”

One of my co-workers reported that one of her clients had said this disparaging remark regarding her personal appearance. It shocked me so much that all I could do for a moment was blink. The client she was quoting was in her mid thirties. I thought I must have heard her wrong.

Maybe it’s just my time.

Does it “just become our time” to get plastic surgery these days, like some inevitable, foregone conclusion? What ever happened to aging gracefully like Whistler’s Mother?

There is something sickening about our new trend towards eternal youth. I understand that people want to retain their smooth skin, high breasts, and taught muscle tone, but at some point, we are all going to get older.

Of course, it’s easy to say that at the tender age of twenty three.

To be honest, I can’t exclude myself from that cultural trend. I’ll probably cry when I get my first gray hair and my first wrinkle.

Like so many girls and women today, I have body image issues. I’m not a slight woman. Slightly deranged, perhaps, but not thin. When I walk past a window or a mirror, I look at myself. I eyeball my measurements and press on through my day ashamed of what I see. I check my makeup and wonder how my face disappeared in the full moon of fat I see in my reflection. I know I’m not alone in this kind of life and I know all of these self-hazardous thoughts are partially true, and partially an infectious disease boiling in my brain.

I work at a gym where I am constantly confronted with the fact that I am out of shape. I perform in an industry where skin deep beauty is a skill you can list on your resume and some girl’s with that one skill and not much else “make it big.” Weight and self image are indelible parts of my life because of the vocational choices I’ve made, but I truly believe that they weaseled their way into my psyche long before I decided to become and actress who took a day job at a gym.

Disney is the devil.

Disney is glorious.

This dichotomy echos in my mind constantly. As a child I loved Disney movies. I worshiped Disney Princesses and sang along to every film. I loved Ariel’s red hair and singing voice, Belle’s spunk and her golden ballgown, and how Cinderella got her Prince Charming even though she spent most of her days toiling as a maid. I idolized them each for their own personalities and also for their stunning beauty. I remember every girl in my class going to see each film and planning to dress as that character for Halloween. I never dared to follow suit because I knew I would look awkward and tubby compared to the rest of the perfect Belles and Jasmines. I preferred odd, lumpy, home made costumes like “The Universe,” complete with hula hoops fit for dangling planets made of tin foil.

Looking back, all of that Princess worship seems relatively innocent, but as an adult looking back at the very animation of Princesses, I have to say, they became increasingly sexualized as time went on. Snow White was a domesticated pie-serving Betty-Homemaker and the last animated Disney heroine, Megara from Hercules, is a bit of a con-artist and seducer who is in league with Hades to meet her own ends. Hers is a story of depravity and eventual redemption. Obviously all of the princesses are idealized, but this one is actually a seducer with a waist the circumference of a pin. Hades is able to wrap his thumb and forefinger around it. That’s sick. She’s was voiced by Susan Egan, the original voice of Belle on Broadway… but that’s neither here nor there. Her voice is sultry and her words laden with double entendre. I’m including the following video to give you an idea of what I’m talking about. It’s appropriately backed with the song, “She’s a Lady,” by Tom Jones.

When the movie came out, I loved her. I loved her power and her prowess. I loved the song she sang. I loved her hips and her sensual physicality. I wanted hair like that. She was sexy and I knew it with every fiber of my being.

I was twelve years old.

I was twelve and I was heralding this woman as a sex symbol. Isn’t that just a bit young to be thinking of someone in that capacity? Don’t even get me started on Jasmine in Aladdin. I loved the way she seduced Jafar at the end of the movie in order to cover for her beloved street rat. I wanted to wear that little red slave girl outfit with the transparent silk scarf draped over my shoulder.

These days, Disney doesn’t even use animation to mask their oversexed young women. They have created real life Disney Princesses in the guise of Miley Cyrus and Vanessa Anne Hudgens, both of whom are idolized by young girls and both of whom have been involved in what I would describe as “provocative picture scandals.” These pictures are so accessible that when I typed their names into Google, their taboo photos came up in the first few image results. Think about how many 10-12 year olds type those girl’s names into search engines every day to be met with sexualized images of their role models. Whats worse, the role models were the ones taking them. They weren’t victims of an evil photographer or director. They chose to take these pictures themselves.

No wonder young girls are dressing more provocatively than ever. They are being taught by example that it is desirable and cool to be sex symbols. They plaster their facebook pages with pictures of themselves in bikinis and bras taken at arms length or in a mirror. They pout their lips and push out their budding chests. They lie about their ages advertise themselves for the attention of male websurfers, hoping one will comment on their wall or their online journal to tell them they are beautiful.

The first time I was told I was beautiful by a man was on the internet. I can still remember the fluttering feeling that pulsed in the pit of my stomach as I read the navy blue comic sans font in the instant message. I got up from the computer and danced around the black swivel chair in my mom and dad’s study, unable to believe that someone could possibly see the beauty I could never find when I looked at searched myself so desperately in the mirror.

Even so, it wasn’t exactly how I’d always imagined it.

I still had to face my classmates every day. Things didn’t get any easier when I went to boarding school. I was an odd, musical theater loving, Star Wars fan whose sense of humor wasn’t exactly main stream. When it came to dances, I was so shocked and frightened that I never stayed for long.

High School dances look like orgies these days. At my high school, all the girls gathered near the stage and danced with each other in a circle, just waiting for a guy to come and “grind” with them from behind. For those who don’t know, “grinding” is a club dance where a man stands behind a woman and the two begin rubbing against each other in a lascivious rhythm. Some people may think that I’m being overzealous in my “wee” crusade here, but I’m just trying to express my own experience. I realize that this is common behavior in high school, but that’s exactly my problem with it. Dry humping has become common behavior at chaperoned school dances. It’s one thing in an +18 nightclub, but in high school? I remember when I was a camp counselor at a summer camp for 10-17 year olds, it was my job to walk around the dance floor with a ruler, making sure all of the couples had at least a foot between them. Let’s just say grinding wouldn’t have made the cut.

So here we are, modern Disney Princesses reaching the age of our former stepmothers and villainous evil queens, realizing our lips aren’t as red as they once were and our skin is no longer as white and smooth as fresh fallen snow. In a way, I suppose it makes sense that we are desperately trying to purge ourselves of all the undesirable traits we find creeping up on us as the years roll on. Perhaps our time is waiting for us just over the hill… and beyond the mossy knoll. With just a little help from a good surgeon and the right diet, we can be ready for our 11 o’clock number.