Well, well, well...
I leave the pop culture shop for a week and look what happens! Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson all up and die. Ed will always have a place in my heart for being one of the best straight men/co-hosts ever to walk the earth. Those are roles that some think are lesser than being the funny guy/host...but damnit...you try to keep it together when you want to laugh or bite your tongue when a really cool conversation is taking place right in front of you...skills skills skills...
I was never a Farrah fan...never was big into the Angels and I never voted for Goldwater while gazing at her poster...however she played a key role in one of the greatest movies ever...The Cannonball Run...That alone makes me miss her already...
Now Mikey opens a can of worms with his passing. People already are comparing his death to the death of that other musical King. When Elvis Died, people went apeshit. There was a genuine sense of loss for that fat man who stole the black sound and made it accessible during a time when it wouldn't have been. When I look back at the old tapes of the people lined up and down the street to watch his hearse go by....it's sincere.
However, when I watched CNN last night...looking at all of the folks outside of the Apollo Theater...on their cell phones and making asses out of themselves while the cameras were rolling...all I saw was a chance for someone to call their cousin Ray-Ray and tell him that they were on T.V. Don't get me wrong - I'm sure that some people feel a genuine loss with the passing of MJ...however, in this day of instant information and 15 minutes of fame in 10 seconds or less...alot of crowd reaction I witnessed seemed forced and put on for the camera.
Interesting to point out that Groucho Marx died 3 days after the death of Elvis Presley back in 1977...his death was all but swept under the rug with the constant media coverage of Elvis. It seems the Jackson "Grouchoed" Farrah yesterday...
