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Drew Shannon

First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.

This isn’t something I confess to very often, because what one does in one’s youth is often hard to justify in the cold, stark light of adulthood. I talk about it every once in a while though, at parties where the conversation has begun to peter out, or when I notice someone’s attention start to flag while I talk about my day job. That’s when I bust it out, the true story of how I spent the better part of a decade being a professional Michael Jackson impersonator.

This was in Mumbai, India, when one really could be an impersonator and get paid for it because the chances of the real Michael Jackson turning up were as high as Saudi Arabia allowing women to drive. He did eventually arrive in India for one concert as part of his Dangerous tour, but I had stopped being an impersonator by then, choosing a job that paid me regularly instead. Until then, I worked with an entertainment agency that offered other impersonators on its roster, most of whom mimicked Bollywood stars, with Charlie Chaplin, Elvis Presley and Jackson alone representing the outside world.

It’s hard to explain to people who weren’t alive at the time just how huge the shadow cast by the King of Pop really was, before the tabloids tore him down. It’s difficult, in our time of streaming music, to describe lines forming outside record stores on the day of an album’s release. The concept of an album as a unified entity doesn’t really exist any more either, but that’s a whole other story. It’s also incredible to point out that Michael Jackson was, for a significant period, bigger than figures like Drake, Kanye West, Ariana Grande, Nicki Minaj and Taylor Swift combined.

From the age of 14 until I turned 21, my job involved dressing like Jackson whenever I had a gig, dancing like him for a song or two to the best of my awkward abilities, then blowing kisses to those assembled, for which I was paid the equivalent of $35 per song. This was a significant amount considering my father’s monthly salary was $60 at the time. I performed at school functions, birthday parties for kids of all ages, the odd cultural festival and even a wedding, for reasons that continue to baffle me. Why would you have a celebrity impersonator on a day when most people prefer everyone’s eyes on the bride and groom alone?

Being an impersonator teaches you all kinds of things, such as empathy for the celebrity one is impersonating. For every event that ended in some confused child asking me for an autograph, there were four other events that made me feel like an object of curiosity and titillation. The need to grab my crotch at well-choreographed intervals must have inadvertently played a part in this, of course, but I never fully shook off the sense of disconnection between people on stage and those watching. It taught me to be careful what I wished for because the spotlight could be an unforgiving, uncaring place where only a performance mattered, never the performer. They had paid and wanted their money’s worth.

The other lessons I learned were about consistency, practice and attention to detail. I spent hours watching music videos just to figure out how he flipped his right foot. I religiously counted the number of beats between verses to make sure I could drop my hat the second he would. To replicate the moonwalk alone took so many months of rehearsal that I still manage to pull it off today if I am drunk enough to be coerced.

Being famous takes a lot of work, and usually involves a lot of people who toil in obscurity behind the scenes. Those years of dancing for strangers inadvertently prepared me for the 15 seconds of fame we strive for today, when smartphones allow us to literally make the world our stage. We shoot videos in the hope of going viral, tag locations to let friends know we're having fun even if we aren't, tweet as if we have an audience hanging on to every word and live vicariously via Instagram. I did that sharing for a while, when those platforms were new, but eventually opted for the calm of anonymity and deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts.

This isn't to say I didn't enjoy being an impersonator. Who among us wouldn't want to exchange our quiet desks for the euphoria of a cheering audience, the thrill of a strobelight tracking our every move or the applause we crave even as children as a sign of acceptance? I genuinely enjoyed what I did, and only now acknowledge how interesting it was compared to the more banal part-time jobs that occupied my classmates in college. I really would do it all over again if I could.

It has been a long time since I stepped onto a stage, white glove on my right hand, black fedora on my head. I didn’t come close to experiencing the heady rush of adrenaline that real performers experience in an arena, but I sometimes miss the roar that would routinely go up when children heard those first beats of Billie Jean that heralded my imminent appearance.

It has been over nine years since Michael Jackson passed away, and I think about how he affected my life and, to a certain extent, shaped it. The money I earned by impersonating him allowed me to study further and paid for my textbooks. Without it, I wouldn’t have the education I do or the opportunities they led to. I no longer identify with the skinny young man in sequined socks who shimmied across a stage, but I still feel enormous love for the artist who put me there.

I miss a world without Michael Jackson because he inspired me to do more than I thought I could. If that is not what an icon is supposed to do, then what is?

Lindsay Pereira lives in Toronto.

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