guilty pleasure monday: p. y. t. (michael jackson)

guilty pleasure monday, dubbed today g. p. m. in honor of my next honoree, michael jackson, and his early 80’s hit p. y. t.

oh please. if you’re over the age of about 39, you danced to this at least 10 times if you had a life back in the day. you know you did. and i did, too, at all those stupid fraternity parties i went to when i was a freshman who didn’t know that there was intelligent life out there beyond campus. yep, those delightful parties where it was 1000 degrees inside a small place where everyone was dancing? where stupid people like me drank the jim jones punch because we thought it was the non-alcoholic alternative?

and p.y.t. was one of the songs i remember from that time. of course, it has a more positive memory — a memory of times when we drove in my friend debbie’s car (she was the only one of my frosh friends i could recall who had a car) over the rickenbacker over to crandon park, where we would sit on the beach — and study! yes, i was that much of a dork to actually study on the beach at key biscayne. and better still — my friends studied, too!

yes: develop skin cancer AND develop your mind, all at the same time. it’s genius.

but i liked the song, enough to let my aforementioned friend debbie convince me to spend $30 dollars — 30 WHOLE dollars — to see michael and his brothers perform at the orange bowl. back then, $30 for a ticket was highway robbery. and i did it. what do i remember about that show? mostly a young african american lady screaming in my ear for what seemed like forever: MICHAEL, MICHAEL, I LOVE YOU, MICHAEL!

sometimes, i hear it in my dreams.

and considering the show they put on that day, it’s actually better that i remember her.

michael went downhill for me after that — i don’t think i really ever recovered much past ben, anyway — but man, i must admit — i didn’t own thriller — i am not one of the gazillion people who bought it and made it the best-selling album ever — but i sure wanted to borrow it and tape it.

which i never actually did, now that i think of it…

6 thoughts on “guilty pleasure monday: p. y. t. (michael jackson)

  1. Hey, we had a copy of Thriller, not on vinyl, not on cassette but on VIDEODISC!!! It is probably around to this day packed away at my folks’ house, however I’m not sure my dad’s videodisc player works these days. It’s a bit of an antique.

  2. I was forever in love with Michael. Even now, I’d kill to see him in concert. Of course, I have to ignore all of his craziness, but we must be the same age because…well… he was the BEST.

  3. PYT was the soundtrack of my college years. It played on the juke box at lunch every single GD day of the year.

    When I read about the Rickenbacker and the Key, I did a double take! Another parallel in our lives. When I attended U of Miami Law School, I used to love to drive over to the Key and South Beach. I remember a cop shooing me off the beach and into my car before dusk sometime in late 1984. It was unsafe to be on or near the beach after dark. Times have changed, and the Eurotrash has taken over Miami.

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