Perhaps you were as blown away as I was by the sight of Madonna performing at the 2005 Grammy Award show. She strutted and gyrated around the stage in high heels and a tiny pink corset pulled so tight you wondered how she could breathe, using that as an excuse to forgive her for lipsyncing to canned vocals at the beginning of the act. But then into the second verse and it was clear she was singing live, ruling the stage in her 70's flip-back Jackelyn Smith-but-blonde 'do, working it like...well...like Britney Spears.

Which got me to thinking; since Britney was essentially "doing" Madonna, how odd was it that Madonna was "doing" herself, albeit interpreted through her younger (and, let's be honest, far less talented) progeny?

Which is when I realized that it wasn't a fluke. It was no mistake that Madonna was up there on stage, showing off such a perfectly sculpted ass that either she's got implants or the woman squats 6 reps of 350 pounds before breakfast, while Britney probably watched the show from her Encino condo, sucking on a diet coke and belching like a truck driver. This was Madonna doing her best Britney doing her best Madonna. Here she was, all frosty, frothy purple-ish pinks and bleach blond girlie hair. Without a doubt in anyone's mind, the seductress was BACK, and fiercer than ever.

And I understood, at that very moment, the shocking truth: Madonna had stolen Britney's soul.

It was blown off as just another publicity ploy by the cynical pop culture punditry at the time, but post facto reflection reveals the truth: When Britney and Madonna kissed, that time they performed together? Like, a year or two ago? On stage of some awards show, performing together for the first time? During a kiss that was deemed utterly "scandalous?" Madonna performed split-second black magic mojo and SUCKED BRITNEY'S SOUL OUT THROUGH HER MOUTH.

Think about it. Madonna was in her Goth Coutour phase - all black hair, black Gautier leotards, long black over coats. It was Britney who had appropriated the blonde slut look, complete with big retro hair and, you guessed it, super tight corsets. In fact, if you go back and do a Google image search of that very kiss, you'll see the looks right in front of your face. Britney =light, frothy, sexy; Madonna = black, harsh, extreme, sexy-but-scary.

And it was after that kiss that everything started to fall apart for Britney - Kevin, the bad paparazzi photos of schlubby clothes and a burgeoning wasteline. Has she put out a new record? Toured in a million years? When's the last time you heard the tabloid tv shows talk about anything other than her stupid husband or her weight? When's the last time you heard her on the radio?

Then, check out recent photos of Madonna. Blonde, frothy, sexy. Tight little corsets and retro-style leotards. Doing Britney better than Britney ever could dream to. Don't tell me that bitch didn't suck Britney's soul out - Don't even try. I know the truth. I know that Madonna's been sitting up in the attic of her English countryside manor, letting Guy take the kids out for another bloody horseride while she consulted her Kabbala book about wicked spells, mixing up witchy potions and brewing up exotic youth serums.

Of course, we all know black magic always backfires, thus the horse riding accident on - no irony lost here - Madonna's birthday last summer, where she broke her wrist, her collar bone, and cracked a few ribs. It also emerged that she was rushed to the hospital after the above-mentioned Grammy performance for an emergency hernia operation. A small price to pay for the soul of a younger maiden, who was stealing her mojo in the first place.

I'm just saying: Think about it.

Madonna, well past the age when most pop divas have taken to hosting lower tier caught-on-tape shows on 3rd class cable channels, is still the queen of pop-dom. She slyly pulled Britney in close enough to get the younger ingenue to lower her guard, then took the uppity little white trash Micky Mouse Club, Star Search bitch for all she was worth. And all it took was that kiss.

Think about it: Where's Britney now? And who really cares?

Madonna? She opened the hottest, most important music awards show on the planet, a spot coveted by the most successful of their class.

Recently, gay magazine OUT scored an interview with her as part of their first ever music issue. These are her words, not mine, so judge for yourself:


Madonna's kiss and tell
AP
08mar06

MADONNA says she had some explaining to do when her daughter Lourdes asked about that kiss with Britney Spears at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards.

"(Lourdes) is really obsessed with who is gay," says Madonna in an interview in Out magazine.
"And she even asked, `Mum, you know they say that you are gay?' And I'm, `Oh, do they? Why?' And she says, `Because you kissed Britney Spears'.

"And I said, `No, it just means I kissed Britney Spears. I am kissing her to pass my energy to her'."

Did you happen to notice that man at the grocery store the other day? The one with the Sharp Irish Cheddar and the bundle of celary and three Yoplait yoghurts in his cart? There was a moment where he stopped what he was doing - weighing a plastic bag full of chocolate dipped pretzels - to stare at your back and wonder if he knew you or not. You probably didn't notice. You were too busy wondering if your boss caught you looking at that nasty web page when she walked in on you, when she was supposed to be in that meeting until noon and here it was, eleven. You were wondering while simultaneously maneuvering your cart around an ancient, wrinkled dwarf woman wearing huge sunglasses and a purple paisly scarf wrapped around her course black hair.

That man stared at your back and could have sworn he knew you, that maybe you were Greta the file clerk in the downtown branch who worked the swing shift. The same Greta who spoke Spanish and German almost fluently and who could sing Beatles tunes like she was Paul. Same pitch, same tone. Greta used to occasionally smile at him when he clocked out, saying something like "Sure glad Monday's over," or "Well, at least it's Wednesday-humpday!" and always "TGIF, George, TGI-fuckin'-F!"

But you weren't Greta. You were the same stress case overly processing know-it-all with a superiority complex and a serious case of sexual addiction. The kid who in 4th grade always had to be Captain Kirk when playing Star Trek during recess, never Spock. Not on your life would you be caught dead playing Scotty or Bones. Never one of those dispensible red-shirts who would get killed every episode.

It was this same dominant style that lead to you being so preoccupied with your own trip that kept you from seeing the love of your life. Yep, that's right. Breezed right by you at the car wash and you were too busy talking loudly into your cell phone about how little sleep you've been getting. The love of your god damned life. You'll never meet another person - or come close to meeting another person - who would have been so perfect for you, but you were busy. Busy busy busy, wondering what the caterers were serving for lunch today, whether you should have the salmon with a mango-avocado relish or the stuffed chicken covered in a sun-dried tomato cream sauce.

You eventually choose the chicken, though you justify that sauce by staying way too long at the gym that night, and no, not because you're cruising the hottie working his abs on the sit-up machine by the water fountain. He didn't even know you were in the room. He was too busy reciting the monologue he was performing in about 2 hours down at the dinghy black box theater on Santa Monica and Cole. He was practicing his diction, performing the exercises that were supposed to help strengthen his esses, not sound so lispy. Queer, to be precise. His agent didn't say it, but he got the distinct impression that his agent thought he was gay. He wasn't, he just had this lisp since he was four years old and by god if that wasn't a hard habit to break.

Of course he got the lisp from his mother baby-talking to him well past the time when that's cute or safe. No wonder he had a lisp. No wonder he couldn't pronounce his r's any other way than "aw", like he was Elmer Fudd or something. Can you blame him? With a mother like that, who talks to her son as if he were a daschund or a parakeet?

But she was a freak. If you'd known her, or saw her picture even, you'd think "that woman needs to get laid." You'd wonder if she was harboring some kind of grudge, or whether she had a painful canchor sore on her tongue. That was the kind of expression she went about her day with. Like she accidentally drank the cooking oil thinking it was apple juice. Her forehead was smooth, not due to lack of worry, oh no, but because her bun was pulled so tight it broke all the tiny hairs at her hairline.

But back to you.

She hated North Carolina in the winter. All the trees were bare; just bony wooden skeletons to stare down at her in dispair, threatening her with their claws. The brown rolling hills were increasingly torn up, revealing the red clay beneath, in preparation for yet another new housing subdivision that would no doubt be built by next Autumn, foundation-to-rooftop. The cars packed into tiny parking lots around the dozens of churches sprinkled along the main 2-lane into town. She hated North Carolina, period, but it was always worse in the winter because that meant it was the holidays and another visit to her parent's house. Pain was too simplistic a word to use when describing the feelings that came with when visiting her folks these days. It was an odd mixture of sadness, melancholy, regret, longing and an odd embarassment brought on by her own inability to communicate any of the above. She loved her parents, she supposed, but no one prepared her for the mix of emotions she felt as they sunk into their aged bones, beset by their various ilnnesses, and prepared, slowly and with their usual lack of consciousness, to die. She felt guilty that she'd never worked out so many lingering issues that hung over the family, feeling that it was too late. Why saddle their aged minds with the torture of guilt? And were they any more guilty than most parents born in the early part of the 20th Century?

She says parents, even though it's actually her dad and her step-mom. Dad was turning 75 this year, and while one would hope that he'd be cared for in his later years by his far younger wife - she'd just turned 59 - it didn't quite turn out that way. She'd recently been diagnosed with frontal lobe dimentia, a mysterious disease that rapidly deteriorates the frontal lobe of the brain. This was the region of reason and calculation, of logic and understanding. The atrophy of this lobe meant the erosion of her abilities to function, a highly stressful situation for anyone to be sure, but more so in someone who took immense pride in their grasp of common sense logic like her step-mom.

So here it was, Christmas, and the entire family was gathering for what was whispered to be her step-mother's last hurrah. Her brothers were showing up for the first time in years - baby brother Joe, a stoner wannabe rock band burnout with a job managing a Foster's Freeze in Piedmont, California, and Bill, her uptight conservative Christian construction foreman older brother on his 3rd wife - so it was shaping up to be an interesting holiday. She'd considered lying to her father about not being able to get the time off work, but he was buying the plane ticket and the tone of this voice told her that he really needed her there. It was strange, hearing him so desperate, this man who'd been a pillar of stability her entire life. His quivering voice on the phone last Tuesday sounded like a scared little boy, and made her feel like a mother - his.

She pulled her rental car to a stop at the curb across the street from her parent's house, letting it idle to keep the heat on. The Christmas lights had been strung across the garage and over the top of the front porch. The latest lights - the kind that dangled little strands of white lights to look like icicles - not the old fashioned big-bulb multi-colored jobs. It was important for them to keep up with the Joneses, especially with the Christmas decorations, for in tight-knit little suburban communities like this, nothing communicated WHO YOU WERE more than the junky bric-a-brac you laid out across your lawn for whatever holiday. The latest coffin-with-vampire for Halloween; a gigantic animatronic white bunny rabbit carrying a basket for Easter; an enormous American flag for the 4th of July; and this Christmas, it was all about the faux wrapped oversized gifts that were lit and placed around the lawn as if a two-story tall Santa were delivering presents for gigantic children. The additional horror here was that her step-mom bought everything Disney, from the Christmas china to the balls hung on the tree. Mickey and Donald and Goofie stalked her everywhere, every time she came, but never more so than at Christmas.

She saw her step-mom step out the front door, bundled in a jacket and wearing her thick house slippers, to sneak a cigarette, something her father hated especially now that it seemed like it contributed to her condition. How could she smoke when each inhale contributed to the further erosion of her brain, he thought. "The first thing I'd do is quit," he whispered to her one night over the phone. Easy for him to say; she sat in her idling car and snuffed out her own cigarette, vowing to quit before her own brain started to show signs of dimentia. Or should she say MORE signs?

Paul was able to manipulate invisible vibrations in the air. He discovered this one night while dancing to a particularly hallucinatory genre of electronic dance music, the kind that thrust its long arm down ones throat and forced one to stand up and boogie like a freak.

He found that as he moved his arms, ripples of spacetime arced out in long, colorful waves that then bounced off the electric auras of everyone around. There was an electric crackle when they came into contact with the waves created by other dancers, so that - in the outdoor dance area of this particular party set amongst an old-growth forest about 250 miles north of San Francisco - there was a symphonic interplay of psychic and very real vibratory wavelengths one could easily describe as a Web of Divinity.

How else to describe the elation that Paul was feeling? It was divine, plain and simple. And he wasn't even on drugs - that was the thrilling part. It was all real, and not caused by some exotic chemical working its synthetic magic on his synapses. What he was seeing, hearing and feeling was absolutely, 100% real, no doubt in his mind. And judging from the ecstatic faces surrounding him that cold early spring night, there was no doubt in any one else's mind either.

He spun, and performed a serpentine motion with his arms, folding his wrists like a Butoh dancer, undulating his torso and writhing with the rhythm. He flicked his fingers and saw tiny specks of light spray out and collide with the rotating spectrum of sound-light waves moving in a gigantic circle, like a huge platter of multi-colored vinyl on the phonograph of space.

A skinny girl with long dredlocks and a colorful Peruvian knit shawl swayed and flapped her arms, holding a bottle of watter and watching as the laser shot its green line of light through it. A small young man in an oversized hoodie pumped out moves that made him look like a robot malfunctioning to the beat. The DJ pumped his fist and smiled at the crowd, happy that his sonic concoction was penetrating the souls of all within listening distance.