Mourning Celebrities

What exactly is the proper response to the news that the most famous and most talented accused-child molester in America has died? Talk about mixed emotions.

Like most shallow, self centered knuckleheads in show business, I place an inordinate importance on talent. I love talent! It’s the one thing I wish dearly I had more of (and, on many nights, comedy club audiences throughout the tri-state area have wished the same…)

I’m a great audience member. I laugh easily, I applaud heartily. I’m always impressed with performers who can do things I can’t (which is why I’m impressed with most performers). Show me the hackiest ventriloquist act in the business, and I’m just amazed they can talk with their mouth closed. I once sang and danced in a Broadway musical (I played Vince Fontaine, the libidinous deejay, in the 90’s revival of Grease – ramma lamma lamma ka dingidy ding da dong…). I can’t sing or dance. I love people who can, even those who can’t do it very well.

So, I was always amazed by Michael Jackson. Pound for pound, who had more sheer talent? If you could quantify talent, give it a numerical metric, Jackson’s number was probably in the high three hundreds (to give you an idea of how high that is on my imaginary scale, my talent number is 17, Charo’s is 32, okay?. No one was even close. Not even the very versatile Tony Danza.

Of course, sadly, the following is also intrinsic to the story of the most talented man on Earth:

• 1) Michael Jackson was pushed into show business. Kids shouldn’t be in show business, show business ruins kids. All child roles in theater, TV and movies should be cast with adult midgets dressed as children.
• 2) Michael’s dad beat him up.
• 3) Kids who are knocked around often grow up to mistreat other children.
• 4) Michael was accused of mistreating children.
• 5) There is no excuse for abusing children.

So, even though my inordinate admiration for talent made me the last rational person in America to defend him (“No, you don’t understand, it’s because he had no childhood that blah blah blahbity blah…”), somewhere in the mid nineties even I gave up the ghost. I came to believe that poor, sad, incredibly talented Michael Jackson was probably succumbing to forbidden urges at his imaginary- sleep- away- camp- slash- lair.

So, when I heard the news last night on the radio (driving to a gig with the terrific comic Cory Kahaney – loads of talent!) I was…a little sad. Relieved? Less interested than I thought I would be?

What can you say? He can’t hurt himself or anyone else anymore. That’s about it.

I react differently to celebrity deaths these days. There was a time when the death of a beloved celebrity would be my own personal melodrama. When I was a young man, and John Lennon was shot, I was in the mass of mourners outside the Dakota honoring the memory of the slain Beatle by drunkenly wailing, sobbing and – with a few other loaded mourners – publicly urinating in the alley a few feet from where he was shot. (This was…um…my personal homage to…uh…Lennon’s lost weekend in L.A. days…)

Now, at the mature age of, ahem, 39ish, I’ve been through a few losses that actual were mine. Unlike Farrah Fawcett, or Ed McMahon, or Michael Jackson, these were people I’d actually met: my father, my mother, my father in law, a couple of very close friends (one died of AIDS, the other diabetes, both ridiculously young), people very close to my wife: a close childhood friend who was in Windows on the World on 9/11, friends, relatives…

This is life. People die, families grieve, babies are born, the Phillies drop nine of their last ten so the Mets, even with all their injuries, are just a game out of first…

In the end, God sorts it all out, so I don’t. He’s better at it than me, anyway. After all, when it comes to talent, God’s number is off the charts.