Michael Jackson
On a regular basis, police officers had to drag the bodies of young women, who fainted from ecstasy during his concerts. He managed to excite and exhilarate the crowds, he made them cry, he connected them with his commanding passion. A great soul, and my first love, Michael Jackson will live forever in my heart. Flying on his moonwalk, he reaches the stars. He has always managed to inspire everybody – from his fans to his team of dancers, who speak of him as if he was some brilliant deity. 0ur eyes adored him. He made all of us sigh.
According to his words, his mother treated each of her nine children as if it was her only child. She taught them kindness, love, and consideration. She played clarinet and the piano, and many of the creative attempts of MJ had been dedicated to her. Michael believes he’s got his singing abilities from his mom and, of course, from God.
When he was 14 years old, people called him “cute” – but suddenly his skin broke out in a terrible case of acne. He looked at himself in the mirror one morning and said: “Oh, no! “His brother Marlon was also covered with pimples, but he wouldn’t care. Michael did not want to go out. He managed the acne situation by changing his diet.
While learning to draw, he made a portrait of the singer Diana Ross. You’d have to say, she was his first love. When he heard she was getting married he was happy for her because he knew that would make her very joyous. But he was a bit bitter and jealous as well, he said she was his eternal love. He rarely spoke of his relationships with women, because he valued his own privacy and theirs. But he loved certain celebrities – like Brooke Shields and Liza Minelli, who was to him a friend he’d always cherish.
Michael believed in wishes and in a person’s ability to make a wish come true. He believed humans are powerful creatures. When he took on a project, he believed in it 100 percent. He really put his soul into it. He would die for it. That’s how he was. Total perfectionist and ardent professionalist, the King of Pop.
Girls flocked at the gate of his house and said the strangest things, such as: “Oh, I am Michael’s wife.” “I am just here to drop the keys from our apartment.” Some girls drove him completely crazy.
He believed firmly that people should abhor violence. When he wrote “Beat it” he was thinking about street gangs, so he gathered some of the toughest gangs in Los Angeles, and put them to work in the video. It turned out to be a great experience. They loved it! “Hey, look at me, I am somebody!” He gave them that chance – for a few days they were stars.
There had been times when Michael would walk into a theater to see a play and everybody would just start applauding – just because they were glad he happened to be there. The price of fame, however, can be a heavy one. Michael was terrified of the lack of privacy. The media prints whatever you say and reports whatever you do. If he went to a public library, the media announces the titles of the books he took. He sometimes thought to himself – “what if he was trying to do something that he didn’t want to be reported in the paper.
To him, nothing was more important than making people happy.
Petronius Arbiter
Petronius Arbiter is a character of the historical novel Quo Vadis, which won the Nobel Prize. Most of everything he valued the athletic body and the spiritual ability to observe certain aesthetic measures in the common loose conduct. His refined courtesy made everybody immediately like him. Every person in Rome, including Nero, was thirsty for his commendations – therefore he was called Arbiter Elegantiarium – the judge of elegant taste. No doubt Petronius surpassed even the Emperor with his luster, and Nero envied him.
When Petronius broke up with his concubine Chrysothemis because of her adultery, he sent to her a pearled pair of sandals, which means in his love language “Go away!” His slave the divinely beautiful Eunice was secretly in love with him. He raised her to the status of his Goddess and delighted in her heavenly beauty and love.
When he was forced to end his life, threatened by Nero, she decided to share his death. But on their death supper, he invited all his friends and read to them a letter he had written to the cruel and rather shallow emperor.
I know, oh Caesar, that thou art awaiting my arrival with impatience; that the true heart of a friend is yearning day and night for me. I know that you are ready to cover me with gifts, make me prefect of the praetorian guards, and command Tigellinus to be that, which the Gods made him – a mule-driver in those lands which thou didst inherit after poisoning Domitius. Pardon me, however, for I swear to thee by Hades, and by the shades of thy mother, thy wife, thy brother, and Seneca, that I cannot go to thee. Life is a great treasure. I have taken the most precious jewels from that treasures, but in life, there are many things that I cannot endure any longer. Do not suppose, I pray, that I am offended because thou didst kill thy mother, thy wife, and thy brother; that thou didst burn Rome and send to Erebus all the honest men in thy dominions. No, grandson of Chronos. Death is the inheritance of man, from thee other deeds could not have been expected. But to destroy one’s ear for whole years with thy poetry, to see thy belly of a Domitius on slim legs whirled about in Pyrrhic dance, to hear thy music, thy declamation, thy doggerel verses, wretched poet of the suburbs – is a thing surpassing my power, and it has roused in me the wish to die. Rome stuffs its ears when it hears thee, the world reviles thee. I can blush for thee no longer, and I have no wish to do so. The howls of Cerberus, though resembling thy music, will be less offensive to me, for I have never been the friend of Cerberus, and I need not be ashamed of his howling. Farewell, but make no music, commit murder, but write no verses, poison people, but dance not, be incendiary but play not on a cithara. This is the wish and the last friendly counsel sent thee by the Arbiter Elegantiarium.
Petronius and Eunice, resting against each other, beautiful as two divinities, listened smiling and growing pale. With them, both perished all that was left of their world at the time, – poetry and beauty.
Lord Byron
If you are to choose any man, from any period of world history, whom would you have? – 189 women from all over the world, spelled the name Byron as a reply. When the byronomania began, women from everywhere were throwing themselves at him in some cases even literally. When she read his work Lady Caroline Lamb announced: “If he is as ugly as Aesop, I must see him…” After that, she promptly declared: “That beautiful, pale face is my fate.” He was an athlete, philosopher, revolutionary, and legendary lover. He embodied all that is called “romantic.”
Lady Caroline Lamb was the most noted and determined of the women who wooed him passionately. Later in his life, he would refer to all women, who were ridiculously over-affectionate as “carolinish.” Lady Caroline remained in history with the fact that she cut her pubic hair and sent it to Lord Byron in an envelope, with most charming impertinence. She was never to give up on him. Biographers call her emotionally unstable – she loses so much weight that Byron cruelly commented that he was “pursued by a skeleton.”
The Greeks have Byron as their National hero because he fought in their revolution. About himself, he says: “I woke up one morning, and I was famous.” In Wikipedia, there is a whole chapter about Byron, which is called: Affairs and Scandals. Byron says about himself – I can’t exist without some object of Love!” In May 1810 he swam the Hellespont and he had a woman before and after.
Here is the poetic reason I am so fond of Byron. It’s a canto from his revered Don Juan, and it reads:
But passion most dissembles, yet betrays
Even by its darkness; as the blackest sky
Foretells the heaviest tempest, it displays
Its workings through the vainly guarded eye,
And in whatever aspect it arrays
Itself,’tis still the same hypocrisy:
Coldness or anger, even disdain or hate,
Are masks it often wears, and still too late.
Lovely words, and so true, aren’t they?
