In THE MUSIC MAN young Opie is enjoined by Professor Harold Hill to

sing and then soon join a band.

There's young Opie (the character Winthrop), long befreckled but suddenly buoyant, endorsing the safe adventure of a band. The parents of that Iowa town are delighted to have their young folks doing something pleasant and harmless rather than hanging around the pool hall learning naughty words.

Harold Hill is from Gary, Indiana:

"There is just one place
That can light my face
Gary, Indiana..."

Winthrop is ashamed to speak. The notion that he could belong to a band and make music delights him, lifts him, all but delivers him from his silent misery. His solos in "Gary, Indiana" are off-pitch but they shake with enthusiasm and uplift.

Michael Jackson is also from Gary, Indiana. He was born there during the second term of Dwight Eisenhower, that most-American of presidents.

Michael Jackson's life, no matter what you or I may think about his music, casts a far different shadow across the same culture than Winthrop's did. Music had a lot to do with both their lives. Fiction had a lot to do with both their lives. Winthrop is technically a character of fiction but I would not want to make the claim that his character is less real than the nonfictional life of Michael Jackson.

I think I understand why Winthrop was able to find his voice and be delivered from his confusion and fear. I do not think I have the slightest clue about the confusions and fears that may have beset Michael Jackson. For achieving iconic fame, the Jackson model is both global and notorious. Winthrop rode the local winds to personal satisfaction.

That Winthrop's life was changed for the better seems a lot more realizable than Michael Jackson's. World acclaim and the company of high-profile film stars never won Jackson the happiness Winthrop experiences singing "Gary, Indiana inbetween his grandmother's clotheslines in the back yard of a small Iowa town. Two adventure models here -- one a modest salvation and the other fraught with peril.

"Gary, Indiana, Gary, Indiana, not Louisiana, Paris, France, New York, or Rome
But Gary, Indiana, Gary Indiana, Gary, Indiana, my home sweet home."

I saw where he was singing "Gary, Indiana" and weirdly I thought of Michael Jackson then.

I also love the song "The Wells Fargo man is a comin down the street!"

Something like OKLAHOMA is just too sudsy for me. I feel like I'm drinking a 2-liter jug of corn syrup.

But THE MUSIC MAN has some teeth in it. It has some Mencken in it. And some Twain. Some very nice blossoms with some very sharp thorns.

A friend of mine who absolutely did not like Michael Jackson's music in any respect, said of THRILLER,

"I have deeply tried to hate this record. And I can't."

A case could be made that people in Gary, Indiana only dreamed of that yellow brick road out of the city, and then along came Michael Jackson to actually follow it. It was a surreal Oz he followed it to, but it was vivid and unprecedented and in great measure unexplainable.

Europeans I've spoken to about U.S. pop culture regard Michael Jackson quite differently than the folks in Nancy Grace's audience.