Lucynda Storey-Erotic Romance Writer

Michael Jackson and I are nearly the same age.  Seriously.  A bit over three weeks difference.  So, when he was starting out on Ed Sullivan and shows like that, I was still out playing stickball in the street.

Michael really hit our home when my youngest sister brought the Jackson Five into our house.  Hey, I had the Partridge Family, my brother had America, my younger sister had Donny and Marie and Deb had The Jackson Five.  I was teaching school when I first heard Weird Al’s parody, ‘Eat It’ making light of ‘Beat It’. 

The kids in my class (7th grade) thought it was a scream.  I did too, but I went listening for the original.  Wasn’t terribly long after that when Thriller came out.  And moon walking, and gloves missing the fingertips.  And some incredible music…I think it was 7 out of 9 top ten singles from Thriller.

Jackson was a mold breaker for the music industry.  He made music videos fun again; taught people how to dance; put incredible sounds together in unique ways.

And like so many other creative forces in the world (Van Gogh comes to mind), he had his own personal demons to deal with (remember the garbage with his dad?) along with the loss of a normal childhood.  Was it any wonder Warren Zevon referred to Michael in his song ‘Splendid Isolation’? 

All these performers represent a part of my youth that I am learning and re-learning every day doesn’t exist any longer. 

I cried when :

Moses died (Charlton Heston),

a smooth talking fantasy maker left us(Ricardo Monteban)

the Andromeda Strain ceased to be (Michael Crighton)

I remembered fondly a terrific supporting actor in Van Johnson (those WWII movies from after school), Richard Widmark, Roy Scheider (what a sheriff he was in Jaws), Isaac Hayes (Shaft), Patrick McGoohan (Secret Agent and The Prisoner) and film producer Sydney Pollack (Three Days of the Condor, and a Colorado favorite, Jeremiah Johnson).

And lest we forget, Paul Newman.

So many of the entertainers that had an undervalued influence on my life through movies, television and music are missing now, an ever present reminder that today is all we have.  I would not be the convuluted, complicated, “deep” (that’s for all the writers out there) person I am today without their contributions to American culture.

I think my first real heart throb hero was Gene Hackman in The Poseidon Adventure.  Handsome and heroic in that turtleneck, a popular fashion at the time.  Gene was followed swiftly by Robert Redford.  I think the movie that sold me on Robert wasn’t Jeremiah Johnson or even Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but rather it was The Sting.  A family favorite here is Sneakers and not all that long ago The Last Castle.  Later it was Bruce Willis in Moonlighting (and pretty much anything since; I am so a Diehard Girl), and then Pierce Brosnan in Remington Steele.

These men are all older than I, but not by that terribly much anymore.  When they are gone, the last of my youth will be too.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 9:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, Lucynda Storey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.