Our Friend Like Me Performance
I killed Prince. I also killed Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, and Robin Williams. I do not plead the Fifth. My guilty tell-tale heart confesses.
I take Halloween as seriously as people take the birth of a child. It is socially acceptable to be anything or anyone for that one day, the more creative, the more “tricky,” the better the treat. So, for over nine months, I incubate for a rebirth. I select a costume when it is still timely to wish friends a happy new year. I then lead up to the commercial holiday by doggedly researching apparel, accessories, conditioning my body and hair for a complete transformation, and mastering mannerisms, inflections, and accents. By October 31, I fully embody a persona I can carry effortlessly through the evening and inebriation.
It seems, however, that when I channel a beloved living pop icon, they die. It has happened too many times to be a creepy pattern or quirky superstition. It is a confirmed, inescapable curse.
Halloween 2008, I was a very convincing Michael Jackson. I wore a sequined zip-down collared jacket and a luxe white glove. I grew my hair through the year, and with the precise cocktail of hairspray, mousse, and gel, it peeked naturally under a flat-rimmed fedora in stringy, streamy curls. I moonwalked in patent black-laced shoes. There is not a single photo taken that evening in which I did not grab my crotch. Michael died suddenly within the year, shortly before his This Is It tour commenced. Yes, That Was It indeed.
I decided to be Amy Winehouse in 2011. Her Back to Black popularity had tapered and I sought to be the only Winehouse in the crowd. Priming for the opportunity, I perfected Amy’s talking voice. In 2008, she released a home video in which she and Pete Doherty puppeteered day-old mice. “Blake, please don’t divorce mummy. She loves you ever so,” I could parrot with dead accuracy. And dead she was on July 23, 2011, a few short months before I placed the beehive on my head.
In 2014, I personified Genie from Aladdin, voiced of course by the one and only Robin Williams. Because Genie is blue and a cartoon, this endeavor was among my greatest Halloween challenges. One that I accepted readily. Deeply entrenched in my upcoming role, I charged my husband with carrying me around as the Magic Carpet. This meant designing and sewing two masterpiece ensembles. (He begged for emergency armholes, which I agreed to cut on the condition they were hidden at the seams and used only in fact for emergency purposes.) Robin died on August 11, 2014, just as I grew comfortable freehanding hugely expressive black eyebrows across my face.
For Halloween 2015, I decided I would be Prince. I’d always wanted to be Prince. I took into account our common facial structure, right down to a mole on our right cheeks, the course afro-viable texture of our hair. I shopped diligently for a purple velvet suit, a white blouse with a rolling cascade of ruffles, platform shoes. I practiced my Kiss routine mercilessly.
My sister, as she often does, tried to dissuade me from taking a great risk. I was imposing an incredible danger to the Purple One’s life. “Mary, there’s no way Prince will die. And if he does, then there’s no doubting that I have this curse and we’ll finally know for sure,” I said. Eventually, she flatly forbid me from it, and at the very last moment I went to H&M, bought an ugly sweater and attended Mary’s Halloween party as Bill Cosby. “Take the risk on someone we won’t miss,” she insisted.
But it was too late. The curse had already attached to Prince. He’s gone. I’m sorry.
I hereby swear to never morph into a living treasure again. Michael, Amy, Robin, Prince. They were each larger than life, fictions to be traced, constructed by ambitious imagination. I wanted to imitate these people because they were inimitable, reduced to digestible form and devoured by all of us. I’m also relieved no one—myself included—dresses as me for Halloween. While I revert to old, nobody chameleon me after one night in a tight skin, sights on new colors, patterns to mimic, these people could not. They wore a Halloween costume daily. The same one, year after year. They could never be anyone else. How sad that must be. I’ve found life is most light-hearted and simple when walking in another’s cursed shoes.