Consider Ola Ray / cover girl, model, Playboy centerfold, actress, monument to Black History.
The God commissioned creme of her delicate and dreamy skin / a full galaxy thrives in her miracle reflecting eyes
Attaché to male singers who prefer their video vixens quiet and pretty as a glass of bourbon.
Black royalty once denied royalties, despite the fact:
She gave the night to George Benson; hot dogs and champagne in a drop top Rolls Royce
She spent48 Hrs inBeverly Hills with Eddie Murphy…
She was cover girl to a product essential to the culture
And for one night, Michael Jackson sang and danced ONLY for her.
She was first to watch and experience The Thriller Dance
We all imagine ourselves as movie stars on screen.
Ola Ray saw herself on screen as a 1950’s dream girl in a poodle skirt, her hair conservatively up, driving around with her teenage boyfriend who strongly resembled Michael Jackson.
Imagine: you and your man at the movies watching
you and your man on the silver screen living different lives, in a different time.
When all of a sudden the Michael on screen morphs into a black panther with a graying lion’s mane.
You scream through woods howling back, while this new beast chases you, karate-chopping down trees.
Who are we watching Ola ray watch Ola Ray screaming on screen?
Her first whisper delicate and silky as Marilyn’s when she asks, “What do we do now?”
Her skin richer than Jackson’s and more innocent; freshly poured and sunrise warm.
She sparkles with the easy opulence of buttered toast / her embarrassment of beauty, like too many dimes in a pocket
She wears nearly the same denim blue as the background but never fully dissolves into mere decoration.
Michael might be the reason we, as audience, are here, but she is what’s important. She is the bright and stable nucleus around which everything rotates. Her red earrings and lipstick / Her robin’s breast blouse and matching shoes.
Hers is the hardest job.
An actor is often paid to do nothing with sublime elegance: Listen, think, watch, respond.
She doesn’t get to dance. She strolls on beat, blushing as Michael bounces around like a puppy.
Then, a swarm of dancing dead rises– not to attack, but perform for her, privately, this love song with no love in it.
Is the song a metaphor for the horrors of dating–from the 1950’s through the 1980’s– putting one’s best self out there only for your chosen one to break out into a monster: a werewolf with Cornel West’s afro, an expressively eyed zombie with an appetite for dance in lieu of brains.
In the video’s final act, after she has stood and watched in horror the synchronized stumbles of the dead, she runs for safety to a nearby haunted house;
The house is more troubling than the cemetery, all shadows and sheets draped over outdated furniture. She leaps onto a covered sofa and screams until Michael touches her, like calling her back from a nap.
Bringing her into the present moment where everything is green and bright and clean. But this present moment is a lie. The house is a sitcom set missing a family.
Imagine Ola Ray in audition. Her character bounces and fidgits and frets, giving superb panic. The director: “Okay, Ola– scream in terror! Now look up into Michael’s eyes lovingly. Soften!”
She steps out of the horror too quickly, flipping an unseen psychic switch from screaming in panic to cuddly flirtation: “Okay Michael, let’s go.”
And Michael turns in secret to the camera and smiles at us. He shares with us his secret that we do not understand.
Is this death?
Has she been eaten and the hallucinated house a zombie’s stomach?
Whatever became of the slobbering zombies having crawled from their tombs to groove, finding no bacon-wrapped hot dogs on the block or food fusions at the cemetery gates, but rather a bi-polar man, part growling beast, part elegant dance-leader and a screaming girl too delicious for the world?
What awaits precious Ola Ray on the other side of morning?
The Dirty Rat 