Touching the ground at JFK, I feel it all coming back. My hometown long ago forsaken for eternal sunshine and the white picket fence, dogs and SUV included.  The lights of the city welcome us on this rainy October night.  It’s 11:00 at night, and I’m wired.

There are beautiful boys on the street. Not California beautiful, but New York sexy. Hot and electric, rough around the edges. Twenty years slip away as I fall into the rhythm of the city.  My accent is back, and so is my light.

We have no responsibilities on this trip, no one to tend to.  Night and day are interchangeable. We stay out until 5 in the morning, and eat lunch at 4 in the afternoon.  I’m wearing mini skirts and 6-inch Louboutin pumps, knee-high boots and glitter. Steven Tyler smiles at me in the hotel elevator.  We have a drink with Jackson Browne.

The  Concierge is a bad boy. He rolls joints for me, and we smoke outside a bar next door to the hotel. He walks like a mobster/runway model, and talks like David Caruso. He smells really good.  He is 6’2 and blonde, beautiful.  I am old enough to be his mother.

TO BE CONTINUED…

I first heard the Jackson 5 on AM radio. Along with the Osmonds, the Partridge Family, and the Carpenters, they provided a boppy soundtrack for the school bus, day camp, and slumber parties.  As a “jappy” teenager on NY’s Upper East Side, I learned to dance to the Jacksons and the Supremes. We privileged children of the 70′s were often caught between a preppy lockjawed ennui, and a more gritty drug enhanced free-for-all. Some of the music changed, but Michael and his brothers kept popping back up.

In college, my dancing got funkier with “”Off the Wall” , as did my world. “Rock With You” was great music to dance to, and have sex  to.   The album itself was an instrumental tool for rolling a joint in my Ivy League dorm room.

The mid-eighties….my first job, first apartment, and I really wanted my MTV. Michael was back, looking curiously different and a helluva lot weirder, but boy could he move. The debut of the Thriller video was a true event. In those pre-Tivo days, my friends and I would often spend entire nights in front of the TV, stoned, Chinese takeout boxes all about. Michael was certainly at his coolest, and truly, so was I. Cool job, Wall street boyfriends, and summer weekends in the Hamptons.

Then some time passed. Well, more than just some.  I got married, fat, pregnant, and boring…not necessarily in that order. I had moved to California, and attained everything I had always wanted. A great husband. A child. A house with an ACTUAL picket fence.  MTV had stopped being relevant years ago, and I sold my “albums” at a yard sale last year. Valerie Bertinelli, another childhood icon, got fat too, and Kirstie Ally got obese. I got botox, upgraded from Nine West to Prada, and somehow wound up with a teenage daughter who really doesn’t enjoy spending time with me.

The deaths last week of Michael Jackson and the fabulous Farrah seem to have shaken me up on a very personal level. It’s not easy to fully acknowledge the passage of time.Take a good look at the video for “We Are the World”. I dare you not to feel old. Remember Hall + Oates? Take a gander at how hot Daryl Hall was. Look at Paul Simon…Huey Lewis…Bruce Springsteen!! Then look at the man or woman in the mirror. I still feel like that teenager in 1979, feathered hair, Calvin Klein jeans, clogs and all. I know you’re still there somewhere, and yes, like Michael, I want you back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmxT21uFRwM