Losing Michael and Farrah 10 years after Ruth.

I'm going to visit my farmer-daughter this weekend, the one who was born the year Michael Jackson recorded "Thriller."

The BBC has devoted an entire half hour of its half-hour news program that I watch every weeknight on my local public television channel. I can't believe that the staid BBC would preempt all of the other news that happened today to carry on and on about Michael Jackson.

Well, even this old granny liked his music, especially his early stuff. As many of his fellow stars noted after his death, he was a genius when it came to his musical career. One commentator went as far as to say that Jackson even planted much of the bad news about him so he would remain in the limelight.

Just how were the stars aligned today? We lost today another star from our female gender...Farrah Fawcett, the most gorgeous of late 70's "Charlie's Angels." My brother-in-law still has her famous wet swimsuit poster hanging in his garage.

While Michael's "Thriller" sold more records than any album in history, Farrah's swimsuit poster also sold millions, up there with at the top of beautiful women who have won the hearts of most red-blooded men in our history.

So here we are, June 25, 2009, which is also the 10th anniversary of my mother's death. She wasn't quite as beautiful as Farrah (especially in her old age, but not bad when she was 18), and not much of a singer like Michael. But I bet she could cook circles around either of them, and do more in a day work wise than either one of them did in a week or a month.

But it still makes one wonder, what is it about June 25th? Is it such a tragic day because it is one of the longest days of the year, exactly six months before and after Christmas? I'm not an astrologist, but this day leaves its mark for me in 1999 and 2009.

As we release Farrah and Michael from our lives and tuck them into the pages of history, we find that the glamor of the 80's has taken a big hit. Wicked cancer took the life of Farrah, while a messed up life and an absent childhood eventually did Michael in.

As a child from a dysfunctional family myself, I find that I have more compassion for Michael who died much too early. I think his entire life was about trying to placate that inner child which never was allowed to be just that, a child. Thus, his attraction to young children....perhaps to such an extent that was immoral...can be understood. Not legitimated, but understood who he turned out the way he did.

Michael was also the victim of a racist culture. He was a man who wasn't happy with the body he was given by his Creator. What a shame that he felt a need to change his nose, change his skin color and change in other ways that did not seem to glorify who he innately was, but which made him into almost a manikin.

Some final words about Farrah and her former lover Ryan O'Neal. It's a given that O'Neal is probably also a camera hog, perhaps going as far as to tell the public that he and Farrah were planning to finally get married. As an older person who remembers his best movie ever, "Love Story," I couldn't help but see that movie become a reality if he and Farrah did marry. In case some of you don't know, the movie dealt with a young man who marries a young girl who soon dies herself of cancer.

So here we are. June 25th, just about a day in history, just as movie, TV and music greats Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. May they both be in peace at last, out of the limelight and in a new light of eternity.

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