Yes, 2016, get the hell out of here.
I can’t say it any plainer than that.
In my 20-plus years of reviewing films for the Beacon Journal and now online and interviewing the occasional celebrity, I never, ever got to meet Carrie Fisher.
I never got to meet David Bowie.
I never got to meet Maurice White of Earth, Wind & Fire.
Ditto Prince.
I never got to meet any of them.
And in the realm of social media, people will tee it up on Facebook, Twitter or some other digital megaphone of their choice and try to legitimize someone else’s grief or connection to someone who was “just a celebrity.”
I simply say: Back the hell off.
Carrie Fisher? I’ve written about my love for Star Wars when I was this paper’s primary film critic.
I believe I even shared why. My reason had nothing to do with being what’s charitably known as a “fanboy.”
It has everything to do with my place in life at that moment in time. My mother did the best she could. It’s that simple. Getting all we wanted for our birthdays or Christmas? That’s for my sons.
Getting all we needed? That was me and my brother.
A village of grandparents, aunts, uncles and family friends raised us — not because they had to, but because they wanted to. The same village tried like hell to stop the emotional abuse subjected upon us by the stepfather from hell.
Three-time convict. Jerk extraordinaire. But my mother wanted to be happy. She was entitled to that, right?
My family couldn’t blunt all of the abuse, and when that happened, I escaped.
I escaped to Randall Park Mall in North Randall to its suburban shoebox theater.
I caught the No. 37 bus up to Severance Mall to sit in its theater.
I saw Star Wars there for the first time. It performed the one task that any good movie is supposed to do — it took me a way.
It was my respite.
On multiple Saturdays — back when movies would camp in theaters for up to a year — George Lucas’ space fantasy helped me forget that I’d been constantly told that I would never amount to anything in life, despite keeping straight A’s in school. Or how my stepfather told my younger brother that without him we’d end up living in a ghetto. The result of that little piece of wisdom: my brother fled for the stability of an aunt and uncle’s home in Selma, Ala. I followed, too, a year later.
But until then, I had Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, R2-D2 and C-3PO to take me away.
To help me reclaim my childhood, my sanity and, in my own odd way, make sense of it all.
Don’t tell me they’re just celebrities.
Maurice White reminds me of the joy before the stepfather as my family danced to Earth, Wind & Fire’s music during the backyard barbecues my grandfather lorded over like the pit master he was.
Prince? My God.
Funk with a conscience and a sense of social justice along with moves cribbed from James Brown. Genius, and his music provided its own sense of refuge as I traversed the years from my late teens and beyond.
As for Bowie? I first heard Fame. Then I found Ziggy Stardust. It took the now canceled HBO series Vinyl to remind me of his genius when a cover of his song Life on Mars was heard on the show.
Each and every one of these people touched me in some way.
Don’t tell me they’re “just celebrities.”
George M. Thomas can be reached at gmthomas@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/GeorgeThomasABJ.