How We Do It In Oklahoma

I told you. Fanclub.

"California v. Michael Jackson is a criminal trial, but if you sit on a metal folding chair in an oversize trailer behind the county courthouse watching it on a 35-inch RCA closed-circuit television set (as most of the press does, partly so they can make smart-alecky comments during the proceedings) for a stretch of several days, you also begin to see it as an epic fable: How the values of a 20th-century celebriculture came home to roost in the 21st.

It's about a boy who was famous as a child, perhaps too famous, who has said he suffered some sort of psychological wound from it, forced by his domineering stage father to perform, even at the times he wished only to play. He parlayed his shyness and excessive talent into a global sensation. Rich beyond imagination, he set about making up for a lost childhood and redesigned his body as well."

The rest.

And, well, Good Lord, I just can't get enough:

"Next slide, please.

(Chuh-click-click.)

Grandma and Grandpa. They're both dead, now. And we had to decide whether to throw all their slides and carousels away, and so we opened the boxes and took the slides out one by one and held them up to the window to see what was on them, and here came the awful truth about slides . . .

Um, next slide, please.

Just hit the -- yes. There you go.

(Chuh-click-click.)

Here came the awful truth about slides: Too many mountains, too many trees, too many prairie dogs and never enough of your grandmother wearing cat-eye sunglasses, giving your grandfather that look she gave him when she thought he was being a precious fool. Too many hot-air balloons or Alaskan glaciers; not enough glum, pimply teenagers trying to look away from the camera. The lack of intimacy is what strikes you. The camera was always pointed at the most colorful thing, the most Kodachrome thing, the thing possessing what we all agree is natural beauty, but it was usually the wrong thing. Here is the turkey we ate in 1978, but why didn't anybody think to take a shot of whoever took out the trash that night?

You'd give back all those sunset slides for just one slide of your father at age 31.

But there isn't one, because he was the one looking through the lens, so it's sunset, sunset, sunset, sunset."

(Chuh-click, chuh-click, chuh-click.)