Petesophizing...

As we approach the doorman I notice JK is holding a $20 bill along with our numbered ticket. He's planning to bribe our way in early and with better seats. I ask him, "Does this work? Do people actually do this anymore?" "I don't know", JK says, "I've never tried it before." I tell him he's my hero.

The doorman stops us because the number on our ticket is too high. JK says, "Is there any way we can get in here right now?" "No", says the doorman. JK says "There's no way we can get in here right now and get a better table?" "No", the doorman says. "There's no way we can get in here right now?", JK intones. Excruciating.

I don't know JK all that well but there's always been an easy connection between us. Certainly Kim is the grounding wire for that connection. Some time has passed since she and I, with no small affection, weathered her twenties together (my early thirties) in a friendship full of dark humor and dark psychological alleys. Looking back, I think there was a kind of unspoken assumption that if we could sort her out we would be accomplishing something bigger than just a couple of people talking in Washington Square Park. We didn't get very far.

But I became her accomplice in the David Mamet sense--by listening. And we established a bond which has weathered even long periods of no communication (mostly my fault). JK knows me almost exclusively through stories of me and Kim from those chaotic--and fun--days nearly two decades ago. The comfort level, the trust, between JK and me is an especially wonderful feeling, coming as it does through the conduit of Kim's memories spoken within their marriage.

Maybe this is saying more about me, but also in this little doorman scenario I flash on the Wisconsin upbringing JK and I share. I once felt the need to shave in a truckstop mensroom just because, like Everest, that living cliche was there. By my own goofy calculus, JK is taking a similar psychic flyer.

I have a little running commentary about how Kim's a true New Yorker, and grew up a rich kid. She knows how to get things done. Whereas JK and I are weighed down by Wisconsin-ness, and all that entails. There's an implicit test of menschness when dealing with a doorman. Of course this has nothing to do with JK's real competence. What a shame he seems headed for no outcome at all. His offbeat and inspired gesture is falling in the woods with no one to hear it. Shouldn't the doorman at least make off with the money while delivering no improvement in our entertainment situation and robbing us like huckleberries?

FINALLY the doorman sees the twenty dollar bill. He says, "You want to get in here right now?" JK says "Yeah" and hands him the twenty. JK is my hero. "You want to get in here right now?" the doorman says. "See if you can get us a good table" JK says. Did I mention JK is my hero?The doorman calls over a waiter, or host, to escort us to a table. Just then Kim jumps into the arms of Gilbert Gottfried's wife, who we're informed has reserved us a great table in advance. Kim tells her "I wasn't sure you'd gotten my email."

I was having a great time already. A really great time.

And Gilbert Gottfried's lunacy advanced the night into the sublime. The unforgettable bit for me was this: Gilbert describes checking into a motel with suicidal intensions. Jesus arrives in a vision to inspire him to live onward. Heading out the door, Jesus offers to make a gesture as long as he's stopped by earth, like maybe ending all wars. Gilbert says, no, go on, get outta here. But then begs Jesus, cajole's him, nags him, to take a piece of cake with him.

My dance vocabulary is not sufficient, but even I can identify in Michael Jackson's breakthrough performance in 1983 the following:

Charlie Chaplin

Fred Astaire
Elvis, of course
Chuck Berry
Karate kicks
Vaudville poses (how many bows does he take in the middle of the number, not just after it?)

There are probably a half dozen references (samples) I recognize but can't pinpoint. (Who in the pantheon used to reach out and shake hands with an imaginary companion?) Like Shakespeare's play Hamlet, there's something for everybody in this dance.

I was going to write that, like the play Hamlet, Jackson's breakthrough moment, the one that survives the passage of time, is nearly incoherent. Fragmented. Not an artistic whole. At the very least Jackson's a long way from heeding the character Hamlet's own advice to the players: Suit the action to the word, the word to the action. Does anybody believe his naive, misdirected hip thrusts could have anything to do with a paternity scenario?

But this morning I realized there is an organizing idea, or maybe a frame tale, to this stylishly patchwork five minutes. His dance, at age 25, is really the dance of a teenager. (So are his limbs.) It's supremely well executed, with flashes of individuality, yes. But those flashes leap from between pop culture references. His overarching persona is a talented kid who's watched too much TV having a Risky Business moment. And like Tom Cruise acting out Bob Seger's Old Time Rock And Roll, incredibly, Michael Jackson is lip-syncing. Pretending. The overall effect, like the moment for Cruise's character in the movie, is to invoke a state of sexual inexperience, which is maybe a state of anticipation, but one certainly dominated by the imaginary.

If you think of him as a teenager at a fantasy distance from the song's decidedly sexual groove and its lyrics of post-coidal anguish, the performance suddenly takes shape as an artistic whole. The nonsensically nonsexual juxtapositions (like invoking Fred Astaire) make sense in a bedroom adolescent world. And the performance becomes, it is, in front of millions, so intimate.

I wonder, though, if at least two aspects of this performance might have reverberated negatively in Jackson's head over the years. First, that the launch sequence for earning gazillions with worldwide fame was so full of unabashed borrowing. The old cliche is that a mature artist doesn't borrow, but steals. Later he would not steal, or borrow, but buy Paul McCartney's catalog--the exploited kid becoming the exploiter receiving checks every time Sir Paul wanted to tour his own music. How that must have felt, especially when his stake in the songs of the Beatles became his principal (perhaps only) income asset. How much better it would have been for him (now rotting in a funeral home) to retain McCartney's friendship and creative kinship. Jackson did have his own well to draw from.

And, as mentioned--and I didn't remember this thinking back to first seeing this performance--the launch of Michael Jackson, the gloved one, was lip-synced. Thanks to YouTube, his solo legacy may be reformatted with thumbnails of lip-syncing at key junctures, a blow to the performance chops he surely had. How did he get away with it when others have been so lambasted? The Superbowl looks pathetic to me. All hat and no cattle. To be sure his voice, complicated by real physical problems, was nowhere close to the vocal strengths of his Mount Rushmore companions, Elvis and Sinatra, both of whom could achieve lift-off with little or no accompaniment. Elvis liked stagecraft and pyrotechnics, but he didn't need them. Jackson's "I'm a fake" panics, like those experienced by all performers, must have run even deeper than his talent.

I hadn't seen this performance in years. It brought out in me real sadness, where before I think my only emotion was a small sense of relief--at not having to watch this guy twist in the wind any longer.