Friday, June 26, 2009

Blame it on the Boogie


I don't mind telling you that when I was scanning Wikipedia for the title of this gem, I found most of the Sweet Dreams title eerily familiar. In fact I may well have read Every Single One (I could do three in a night and still have time to fit in an episode of A Country Practice).

Anyway, this gem was about a girl who lived her dream - yes *squeesallround* she was IN A MICHAEL JACKSON VIDEO CLIP! Likeomigosh, she's the luckiest girl in the whole wide world. Exclamation mark! The love interest was not Michael Jackson, but another boy (whose name, I believe, was also Michael, and he looked like Michael, and he danced like Michael...he was like Ersatz Jackson). My memory of the storyline is that she decides to Get Noticed by Real Michael, embarks on a series of cringeworthy embarrassments and almost succeeds in alienating Ersatz forever, but finally she realises, that the minor C-grade celebrity is the boy for her after all.

From memory, I found this book quite exciting. My sister owned it, so I read it several times. There was something genuine about the brush with celebrity it offered. Perhaps because Sweet Dreams World usually never intersected Real World (except for the odd mention of Pat Benetar and Laura Brannigan).

I think by the time I read it, Michael Jackson had already begun his lifelong affair with a bizarre combination of self-hatred and egotism having plastic surgery. To me his life was a tragedy, and I'm really really not sure what his death was. But, such as it is, this is my tribute to Michael, or at least, this is a thread of a memory, a place of innocence from which I beheld him.

Here's hoping he finds some corner of afterlife to do over, and have a life that seems - to me at least - to have been taken from him, because the boy could sing, and there must be money in that.

3 comments:

  1. Oh yes indeed! I remember that one although haven't quite retained the memory of the plot like you! Sweet Dreams were all part of the puberty process, huh?!

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  2. So it goes... a sad story but I like your ending.

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  3. Oh, I read heaps of those! And the girls nearly always had 'edgy' or boyish names. I still remember one, I think she was called Charlie, and the cover has her biting a green apple (don't know why that stays in my head). Another, the girl was in a band and she looked pretty colourful on the cover. VERY 80s.

    Ahhh, thanks for the memories.

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