Memories and Michael Jackson

With all the media coverage surrounding Michael Jackson over the past ten days my daughter, Hannah, and I have had many conversations about the pop superstar. Yesterday at lunch she asked me if I would watch “Thriller” with her. So last night she pulled up the video on You Tube and we watched it together.

I guess this is father/daughter bonding in 2009. An eight-year old pulls up a You Tube video on the Internet and she watches it with her dad. I wonder what Ozzie and Harriet would think.

I was surprised at how long the video went—about 14 minutes. As I was watching and silently critiquing it, I thought that the video (really it was a short-film) was a reflection of its time. We don’t have the attention span today that I guess we had in the early 1980’s. No video would last 14 minutes today.

For me the best part of the video was the dancing. As I wrote last week I hadn’t seen Thriller for years. I remembered all the zombies dancing with Michael Jackson at the end. When Hannah got a bit bored I implored her to wait for the dancing, wait for the dancing.

I prefer my memory to Thriller compared to what I saw yesterday. Tastes change, times change, cultures change. Sometimes memories are better than reality.