Thrillered

I finally came up with a sentence in the English language scarier to my children than the “your Mom’s going on Spring Break” line was a few years ago. And those words would be …

“Your mother is on YouTube…” (pause for effect, note the holding of breath at this unforeseen announcement, the slight brow crinkle, the arch of one eyebrow slowly rising upwards in disbelief)

…"dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller.”

Bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha! With four kids to inform individually after the fact, trust me, I got all the mileage I possibly could in the maternal embarrassment department.

And doesn’t it feel just wonderful when that happens? A cosmic turning of the tables, a reaffirmation that you can still surprise them. Just when they thought—after the passage of the junior high and high school years—that you were okay to be around again, cue the theme music from “Jaws.” Gotcha!

I could write a thousand words or more about the look on my eighth grade daughter’s face when I showed up at the door of her classroom bearing Halloween cupcakes…and dressed like Pocahontas. Oh wait a minute, I did that already. But this was so much better.

Not that it was intentional to start with. I had been oblivious to the entire thing until I was sitting in my office one day, across the desk from a defendant and her attorney, ready to engage in what’s called the “pretrial conference” part of the case. I leaned forward politely and expectantly, thinking we would start talking about crime and punishment and alibis and mitigating circumstances, when he looked at me with an air of bemusement.

“Didn’t I just see you on television this weekend? In a park, in a really big group of people … dancing to Michael Jackson?”

I was BUSTED!!!!!!!

It was hard to keep a straight face after that for the rest of our official tête à tête.

As usual, when I’m engaging in silliness or risk of epic proportions, there’s a certain man that I hold dear who has his hand extended, saying “Let’s!”

This would be the same guy who has been responsible for my being on the back of a Harley flying down the interstate surrounded by a hundred other bikers coursing like blood through an artery, hanging on with one arm around his waist while I snapped pictures over his shoulder with the other. Or strolling around the grounds of a Renaissance Faire decked out in a lace-up bodice, long skirt and cleavage while he accompanied me in tights, period boots and a leather vest. Or cutting concrete pavers with a chop saw off the back of a Ford F-150. There’s rarely been a dull moment.

So when my friend Mary Kay announced that as part of a park promotion she was handling, she was organizing an effort to break the world’s record for the largest number of people dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” at the same time, it was just a matter of time before he said … "Let’s!”

Never let it be said that I didn’t try to prepare. An entire 48 hours before we were set to show up at the park, I put my younger daughter’s DVD collection of Michael Jackson videos in the disc player and tried to figure out what was going on. How hard could this be, I thought. The first hitch in the plan came in the fact that I have absolutely no sense of coordination or rhythm. Walking in a straight line is my fitness activity of choice.

The second problem came in realizing that if I was going to mimic what Michael Jackson was doing in the video, I was going to have to not only do the same steps … I would have to do them in reverse since his image was facing me on the screen. Oh, dear. I made it through the first thirty seconds and gave up, counting on being surrounded by a cast of thousands to mask the inevitability of my faking it.

A whole 24 hours before the dance started, my boyfriend’s daughter mentioned that there was an instructional website devoted to teaching the greater world how to master each and every turn, spin and lurch in the Thriller video. Three hours before we were scheduled to leave for the park, I finally looked it up on my home computer.

On the plus side, the website was a wonderful resource, imparting instruction in each movement via example, repetition, consolidation, music, verbal cues and prompts and the ability to repeat each step over and over and over until you got it just right and were ready to learn the next. Relentlessness is a great teaching too. On the down side … it would take me a week to get the whole thing committed to memory. Assuming I had enough room on the old hard drive to even remember the whole thing. Really, how many hundreds of times did you have to listen to the long version of “American Pie” before you could sing all the lyrics and not just the “Bye Bye…” refrain?

I stared diligently at the screen, pushing the “repeat” button often and jerking spasmodically on command. And then my escorts arrived, and my standard for the day’s performance slipped from “git ’er done” to “as good as it gets.”

We poured into the park with about sixteen hundred other folks and went through a few warm-up sessions at the edge of ye olde swimming hole before the actual event. Humanity—and other Michael Jackson fans—showed up in all varieties. There was a goodly contingent of folks like me, grownups who were dressed for a summer stroll in a park on a Sunday afternoon. Namely, wearing khakis or capri pants and sandals and T-shirts, and maybe holding a beer. Then there was a vast delegation at the other end of the spectrum who courted the spirit of “Thriller” and Michael Jackson and the local TV cameras with ghostly makeup, ragged lace, tattered satin and fishnets. And boy, did THEY have the moves! Oddly enough, none of them seemed to be over thirty. Somewhere in the middle fell the younger kids, and the dilettantes who came sporting perhaps a single glove and a snap-brimmed hat. My guy sported a bright red vest, a dangling earring and, of course, the glove.

Eventually, the time of reckoning was upon us, the music started and the cameras rolled. I managed some respectable “zombie shuffles” and “head snaps,” and otherwise tried to flail and lurch in sync, secure in the knowledge that since I was a good half dozen rows from the front of the group, my primary value was as cannon fodder for the official head count. I tried not to bump into anybody when the direction of the dance suddenly turned and the group’s movement channeled the swift synchronicity of a school of sardines changing course in a nature documentary.

Later, all laughing and sweating and exhilarated, I filed the experience under the “been there, done that!” category, and went back to work secure in the knowledge that absolutely nobody in the larger world had any idea what I’d been doing that Sunday afternoon. Until we started the pretrial conference.

I emailed Mary Kay, who moves with the speed and efficiency of a panther in her promotional work, for an update. Well as a matter of fact, she said, while we hadn’t managed to come close to cracking the world record for a group “Thriller” dance, we’d set a new U.S. record and videos of our local effort had run on local news channels, the Today Show and CNN. Oh good lord!

I checked out a few of the videos for myself. I was buried somewhere in the background of one, for about two seconds. If I hadn’t been looking for myself and known where I was standing in the day’s lineup, I’d never have seen my own face. My colleague must have been watching this on a Jumbo-Tron with a magnifying glass to recognize me.

And yet…in the annals of what you can use to ambush your kids on a slow day, it still officially counts.

The park is now covered in a blanket of snow, the TV cameras have long since moved on to cover other deranged souls like the guys who jump into frozen lakes in their Speedos on New Years Day, and I haven’t done a “zombie shuffle” in six months.

Still … my youngest son just got engaged over the holidays. There won’t be a wedding for at least another year or so. I’d say that gives me plenty of time to learn the rest of the “Thriller” moves before the reception. Just in case it's a slow day…