Having been a member of a couple of Michael Jackson fan sites for the past 4 years, there are certain questions which seem to come up very often…

1) Who are Michael Jackson fans?
2) When/Where/How did you become a fan?
3) How has MJ influenced your life?
4) What makes the hardcore fans so loyal and defensive?
5) What does Michael Jackson mean to you?

95% of the time, I have skipped those questions because they’re not as easy to answer as they appear on the surface. Some of them border on the “highly personal” because the answers go deep and others are somewhat complex because there’s more than one layer to the answer…at least for me. All in all, I could hijack a discussion thread with the length of my response to such questions so, out of courtesy, I have often passed on those topics. However, in celebrating the 25th Anniversary of Thriller, I have decided to take a walk down memory lane and explore the various layers of my answers since it was during the Thriller-era that the root of those answers can be found. I believe a child growing up in a particular era tends to be defined by that era in some ways, and that was definitely true for me.

In my blog entries, it is my mission to explore the virtues, life-lessons, and overall influence the Thriller era and Michael Jackson had upon me as a person and a fan. I plan to use rare interviews, articles, quotes, photos and share many unearthed items from my personal MJ collection as the focus of my entries. And I hope each story supplies a piece of the puzzle as to who I am as a Michael Jackson fan, why I feel he has earned my loyalty and respect, and how he has impacted my life as a whole. Bundled together, those pieces should answer the bigger question of what Michael Jackson means to me.

March 10,2008 Update:
For technical/space limitation reasons, blog moved to... http://360.yahoo.com/therealwendy2004

http://uk.youtube.com/TheRealwendy2004

Thanks for reading.