Profunksticated

Profunksticated had to come out of hiatus for a minute to comment on the loss of Michael Jackson.

I can’t believe I’m feeling a certain kind of way. I feel like I lost a second cousin who was my age. When I first heard the Jackson 5, I honestly believed whoever singing lead was a girl. I found out otherwise, of course. Girls in my fifth grade class would play those large-spindle-hole 45 rpm J5 records such as I Want You Back on those snowy days we could not go out for recess.

I liked the Jacksons when I was 10, 11 and 12, but as I entered my teen years, they became just another group playing in the soundtrack of my life. That’s not to say I didn’t like them. But their still-bubblegum style was competing for my musical attention with funkier groups such as the Ohio Players, Kool and the Gang, Earth Wind and Fire, War, and of course, Parliament-Funkadelic. Matter of fact, the first album I ever bought was a Motown label, but not the Jackson 5 . It was Stevie Wonder Presents Syreeta. I loved the cut I Want to Be By Your Side.

By about 1975, I figured the Jacksons were done as I hadn’t heard much from them.

But then in early 1977, my senior year in high school, I was laying half-asleep on the couch in the living room with WDAS-FM playing on the stereo when I heard this real smooth cut with a group singing the lyrics “Let me show you the way to go.” I was shocked when I found out those singers were the Jacksons, minus Jermaine, on a new record label. Wow, they’ve come back and strong, I thought.

Then Michael went off on his own and blew up like a hydrogen bomb. You all know the rest of Michael’s story, so I won’t rehash it here.

My 21-year-old daughter shares a birthday with Michael Jackson, which is August 29. My wife went into labor on August 28, 1987. Had it not been for the fact that our baby was too big for my wife to push out — the doc tried everything to bring our baby into the world, including forceps and a Dirt Devil (just kidding) — my wife would not have undergone the Caesarean section that resulted in the birth of our first child, weighing in at nine pounds, seven ounces, at 32 minutes past midnight Mountain Time on the 29th.

Had our daughter been born before midnight, on Aug. 28, she would have shared a birthday with one Richard Sanders. Who is Richard Sanders, you ask? He’s the actor who portrayed the nerdy, bumbling newsman Les Nessman on the sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati.

Nothing against Mr. Sanders, but I think my daughter got the better end of the deal, being able to brag that she shares a birthdate with the late King of Pop.

RIP, Michael Jackson. And may God comfort the Jackson family in their time of loss.