Poor Farrah, her life and passage and testament to courage and independence of spirit, to be so overshadowed by the "King of Pop" made me sad. While browsing the apparently infinite number of news articles, blogs, forums and image galleries dedicated to the passing of Michael Jackson I came across a photo of MJ sporting a "Farrah" hairstyle. I smiled to find that dear Farrah had even influenced the man who's death now eclipsed her own.
It got me thinking about the strange inconsistencies and coincidences that appear in my own life. The most common are simple things like finding three pennies on the ground on three street corners, or typing a word just as someone speaks it on the TV or radio. But much larger concordances seem to happen also. One of the most striking occurred to me when I was 17 years old.
I grew up in a college town, and as a high school senior I loved to hang out with the athletes who lived in the off-campus dorms near my home. Rick Fray was a wrestler and a bartender at the university student social club. He was charming, nimble and always funny, and very much in love with his fiance (our relationship was just friendship). I spent hours chatting with him in his dorm kitchen while he soaked his elbows in spinach - apparently a strange cure for one of the ailments that held motivated wrestlers back from the pinnacle of their success.
Rick Fray moved out of that dorm and here was the first point in the sequence of strange synchronistic coincidences, my soon-to-be boyfriend took over the same room and dorm kitchen. I met Rick #2 at a rugby game where his short stocky stature allowed him to prop without barely having to bend his knees. Imagine my surprise when I visited him at his "home" the first time to find he was now living in the old room of "Rick #1".
On one very strange night I visited the university social club and joked around with my friend Rick #1 for an hour or more, about everything and nothing, and then headed down to visit my now boyfriend Rick #2 at his home. We sat in the kitchen. We drank beer, (yes I know I said I was 17 but beer drinking was the norm at 17 where I grew up) and laughed, sitting in the very kitchen where I had sat so many times before.
At 12:42am, in the middle of a sentence in which the next word out of my mouth was supposed to be "Rick" I froze in my seat staring at the clock high up on the wall for endless seconds. Speechless.
My boyfriend, Rick #2 encouragingly finished my sentence for me "Rick.. me, my name is Rick", he said laughing probably thinking I had forgotten his name.
I laughed along with him but distractedly, nervously, and I still never finished what I had been trying to say. The strangest moment of frozen immobility had come over me while staring fixadly at the clock showing that time. I was startled and embarrassed but I brushed the thought from my mind.
The next morning my clock radio wakens me and the news reporter is reporting the accidental death of Rick Fray (#1) at 12:42am that morning. He had been hit by a drunken taxi driver as he cycled home from the Student Union Building after work.
My sudden paralysis of the night before now had an explanation. But not one that fits in with our currently understood laws of existence. It was a fine lesson for me in the deeply interwoven nature of the universe, one that perhaps cannot be reproducibly demonstrated to others, but when appreciated personally can give a deeper, richer understanding of the life we are experiencing.
Michael Jackson as he appeared in 1997 at the The Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles, California
Picture: WIREIMAGEThe passage of MJ and FF is like that for me. When I saw this picture of MJ wearing his hair Farrah style, I knew there was a way to visually express this merging and synchronistic experience I felt at their passing on the same day
It was a simple matter to locate a picture of Farrah that could be matched with MJ's pose. And what a delightful search, as Farrah at every age was so beautiful. This one struck a chord for me as showing her as I would love to remember her.
Each week on this 70s crime-fighting hit the fearless Angels fought evil dressed in either bikinis or scantily clad uniforms. Even Farrah once said: "When the show was number three, I figured it was our acting. When it got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wore a bra."
Image processing
Flip Farrah's image, rotate it 18 degrees, clone patch the holes. Then over to MJ's image, where I (clumsily) cropped him from the background and adjusted the hue, saturation and contrast to give an image that could merge with Farrah's black and white loveliness.These two images were then inserted into the cool morphing tool provided by the University of St Andrews in the UK.
(This link may crash some browsers not fully updated with current Java)
This tool does not permit the saving of the morph you create so I painstakingly took screenshots of sixteen stages of the progression in their morph. Imported each frame into Adobe Fireworks and cropped it in exactly the same location allowing me to grab just the sequence I need. Each of the 16 frames is used twice in the forward and backwards progression of the animation which repeats, but is not playing backwards, I just reversed the image sequence for those frames.
An unintended but interesting consequence that emerged is that MJ appears to be winking his right eye.
What synchronicities have you experienced?
Almost synchronistic
http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/tv/3deaths.asp
The Jackson Five performed on the Tonight Show one day before Farrah appeared in 1974.. but Ed McMahon was on vacation.