As an added bonus, video comes with an embedded blooper! See SwingWoW instant Celebrity John Festa mess up Jackie’s name on LIVE youtube!

And, for the next 5 minutes, get New York City for only another buck 75! What a bargain! A whole city for less than 2 bucks! At this price, you’ll want to buy two of them.

But remember, this is a limited time offer. Get them while they’re hot!

If above video doesn’t work, click on link below.
John Festa pitching his new dance event Hudson Swing Affair SwingWoW

Find out more. Go to the web site of the Hudson Swing Affair. Labour Day weekend, 2009.

Teaching staff for the event: Sharlot Bott, Andrea Deaton, Ramiro Gonzalez, Blake Hobby, John Lindo, Mario Robau, Jr, Charlie Womble and Jackie McGee. Music by John Lindo, Andrew D’Angelo, Greg Parmerton & Margio Robau, Jr.

A smart man once told me that, when we cry, we always cry for some part of ourselves. The trigger is something that happened to someone else, but the emotional response is ours, not theirs.

Maybe, when we cry for MJ, we cry for the child each of us once was. I don’t know. But I agree with what John Landis said a few days ago on CNN. There’s no reason for this man to be dead. It makes no sense at all. He was healthy and dancing his heart out just a few hours previously. We’ve all seen the videos. How does someone with the stamina to go through that dance rehearsal suffer cardiac arrest?

And the inner voice? Could it happen to us to?

But I must have missed the memo. Because the day that Michael Jackson died, a week ago now, there were 2 wars on. Iran was turning into a mess, with civil disobience in the streets and, we’re told, the secret police “disappearing” people. Farah Fawcett had died. North Korea was threatening to throw missiles up into the sky, aimed at Japan. The US was about to pull some troops out of Iraq. Did all that stop?

If not, why is Michael Jackson getting 90% of the airtime? Do those other things not matter? Does it really matter that they found Michael Jackson’s monkey? This is news?

Oh, I heard Sarah Palin resigned for no reason anyone can understand. That did get a little air time on CNN, but mostly because no one could figure out why she resigned.

Now, let me get this straight. I have a legal obligation, as a plain Joe citizen, to stay at the scene of an accident if I witness it, assist emergency workers and speak to the police to give witness testimony.

He was more than a casual witness, hence, I would guess, a more compelling obligation to stay.

He’s a trained cardiologist, he administered drugs to MJ about an hour before, MJ had gone into cardiac arrest, he was administering CPR to MJ, he was the personal physician, yet he suddenly remembered another more pressing engagement? He was late for his pedicure? What can be more important than staying with your personal patient who has just coded? Forget that it was Michael Jackson. Forget that he was hired as personal physician to this specific patient. Isn’t every doctor expected to stick around until the ambulance arrives under these circumstances?

The police say he is “co-operating fully” with them. Huh? He already didn’t co-operate (or even operate) as he should have. What am I missing in this story?

It seems that everyone now thinks drugs and prescription drug overdose played a role in his death. How much, which drugs, etc, remains unclear. But there were, it seems, warning signs for some time. A number of people, including Michael Jackson himself, seem to have seen the trouble coming, but were unable to stop it.

LisaMarie Presley posted on her myspace blog that Michael was worried years ago already that he would die the way her father died.

There are some unanswered questions, though. There was a doctor there an hour before, a cardiologist, who gave him demerol. If I understand the 911 call properly, the doctor was there and administering CPR. But he was gone by the time the ambulance got there. What’s up with that?

Farah Fawcett died too. How come she got 10 minutes (if that) every hour and MJ got 50. Not to say he wasn’t a great dancer and all, but didn’t she deserve some remembering too? She did some neat stuff in her life too, even if she couldn’t moonwalk.

And isn’t there like a near civil war or the next Tienenmen Square happening in Iran? Did we suddenly forget about that?

As an aside, I find it ironic that this news has caused several major servers on the web to crash.

Michael Jackson was younger than I, which gives a person pause. And he was supposedly in good health. So that’s a bit of a surprise.

Good bye Frankie. A lot of people are going to miss you.

You can see him dancing, in his youth, in this clip. He’s the guy who comes on at just about the 4 minute mark. From the movie Hellzapoppin’

Here he is 3 years ago, dancing with another friend, Sylvia. It was his 92nd birthday party.

Frankie dancing with Dawn Hampton.

Update: Obituaries are starting to flow in. I won’t list them all here, that would be too much, but a few are worth linking to here:

• The New York Times has some very good links to other good content, including the 2001 attempt to save the Alhambra ballroom.
• The Los Angeles Times

If you want to find more, here’s the google search to find them.