When the dust settles from the week that was—the news tributes, the restoration of EBay and Amazon catalogs, the pending autopsy—one question might surface: where were you when you heard the news? I’d just walked into Casanis, a Lower East Side bistro, for dinner with J; after I placed my wine order he told me Michael Jackson had died, and after we shook our heads, newly stunned after earlier news of Farrah Fawcett’s demise, I made a joke. “I can hear Farrah now: ‘that bitch, couldn’t he have died on a different day?’” But things grew somber after a brief discussion with our waitress (one of those beautiful showoffs with a marvelous command of both English and French) who had to excuse herself for a brief weep.
She was at least a generation younger than me, which speaks to the effect Michael Jackson’s time in this life had on multitudes; surely she hadn’t experienced him the way I had, as a child only a few years his senior, shamed by his precocious grace and his fresh, once-in-a-lifetime talent. She probably came of age during his Off the Wall-Thriller years—peak years, as time would show.
I don’t think the impact of the week’s string of deaths (Ed McMahon confirmed the famed adage that such departures always come in threes) landed until later that evening during John Kelly’sPaved Paradise Redux (closed at the Abroms Arts Center). This downtown artist was conjuring the essence of Joni Mitchell, another ultra-legend, through his own astounding arsenal of gifts: a spry falsetto, lovely goddess gowns by Gabriel Berry, a wit made more effective for its reluctance to trade on typical drag bitchness or winking irony—watching Kelly, you believed the humor emanated from Joni herself.
It was Kelly’s rendition of Mitchell’s “Blue” that put a stamp on the day’s odd, collective sorrow. “Blue, there is a song for you, inside you’ll hear a sigh, a foggy lullaby,” sang Kelly, and I thought what a fitting lamemtation the entire evening had been for those who’d just departed, and the others (the actor T. Scott Cunningham, pitchman Billy Mays, actor Gale Storm, show producer Morton Gottlieb, the impressionist Fred Travalena) who’d follow as the weekend loomed. Maybe the month’s weather systems presaged these passings—for now, who can argue with this sense that June feels like the saddest month of the year.