What follows are some ideas I banged out late the other night while writing the invite to my 2nd Annual MJ Memorial Flashdance (tonight! y’all should come). It isn’t particularly well-written (it was 3am!) but I’ll post it anyway, because the thoughts are important to me & I don’t have time to improve it just now (my apologies! – I’ll try to get back to it later I hope… feel free to leave edit suggestions in the comments 
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Besides color, what’s different about these two “Michael Through the Years” images?
from the Chicago Tribune
from the Daily Mail UK
I think it is that the Chicago Tribune stopped at 1990? Why? Maybe because it is easier for us.
In the aftermath of MJ’s death, I was once again reminded of the fact that we as a culture have a hard time getting it right when it comes to dealing with our heroes and our villains.
If the person is a hero, like one of my greatest heroes, Martin Luther King, Jr., we try like hell to make them into a saint – someone who was a perfect paragon & could do no wrong. Even if, as in the case of MLK with his plagiarism & infidelity, that is patently untrue. And if the person is a villain, we make them into a monster – someone beyond human understanding. The problem with this approach is simple – in both cases we put a huge amount of distance between us and them, a distance that costs us in many ways.
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Does anyone have any good pix from either of the last 2 FlashDances? I’d love to see them & use some for this post!
So another two months, another two good FlashDances. Both of these were a little smaller than I would like to be honest, but I still had plenty of fun. There were extenuating circumstances in each case, but still I can’t help but wonder if people still love ‘em as much as I do… I guess we’ll just see how it goes for the next few…
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FlashDance 25 was two months ago, at 24th St BART & was the first FlashDance of the season. I was expecting a little bigger turnout (it was maybe 100 people at the biggest) but was short notice (I only got the first email out on Thursday)… but it was a lovely medium sized FlashDance & the cops who showed up were reasonably cool (props!). The playlist is below.
FlashDance 26 was this past Sunday night. It was supposed to be Saturday night and had all the signs of being another epic Ferry Plaza FlashDance – but FATE intervened for the worse: My sound system died the Friday night before & I spent all day Saturday trying to revive it. For such a relatively simple system, it seems like it would have been easy to pinpoint the problem, but alas that wsn’t the case. It took a lot of experimenting and guesswork, with multiple hopeful fixes & crushing failures and consulting with more electrically inclined friends (thanks Eric Arons) to get a handle on it & by the time I did, I was 30 minutes late for FlashDance. And then, after all that struggle seemed past, I blew out the system in my haste to set it all up. Grr. I had to cancel & reschedule & hope I’d be able to fix things the next day. I was devastated. I also understand that there were a lot of people that night who were at Ferry Plaza or had really planned on being there later. UGH. I’m so sorry folks!
It turns out I had blown a bunch of easily replaced fuses & the next day, Sunday, we were back in business. So we headed back to ferry Plaza on a GORGEOUS Sunday night (three day weekend!) and rocked it out. Again I was hoping for bigger turnout, but given the reschedule & the fact that it had been Carnavale that day, & that many people are out of town, I think the 80 people or so (at the biggest) acquitted themselves quite well. The playlist is below.
Anyway – like I said, we’ll see how FD 27 goes. That one will be the Michael Jackson Memorial FlashDance in late June – it will be interesting to see what that is like – one year out from the best FlashDance ever! Check the videos of last year’s mega-awesome after the jump…
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