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Dearest Madonna,
Let’s be honest: we’ve had a rocky relationship
in the past.
While I have always loved your music and
appreciated your many talents throughout the eighties and
half of the nineties, I just didn’t exactly “get”
you. It took some time before I fully came around and veered
from mere appreciation to hard-core fandom, obsessively
catching up on your entire discography, throwing an enormously
successful Madonna-themed 30th birthday bash, and traveling
to Lisbon to see you for the fourth time on the Re-Invention
Tour.
My best friend, Jason, however, absolutely
got you from Day One. He, a devout enthusiast, loved to
regale us with stories of waiting to get into the Blond
Ambition shows at Madison Square Garden; how he,
a Chicago native, worked as an extra on A League
of Their Own; and one of the pinnacles of his too-short
life, when he finally had the chance to meet you at the
Virgin Megastore in Los Angeles.
Jason’s adulation of you was nothing
short of infectious. We were never lacking in references
to you in conversation. Jason always joked about starting
a religion called “What Would Madonna Do” (seemingly
before you marketed that idea) and changing his name to
Ciccone should he ever get married. He pored over your videos
and concerts as if they were gospel and dissected your every
incarnation, gesture, lyric. By the time Ray of
Light - regarded by my group of friends, and probably
most of the guys in my generation, as the ultimate statement
of our lives at the time - had hit, I had relented in Jason’s
passion for you.
We gossiped about Drowned World,
which he had seen in London in order to catch it before
us New Yorkers; deconstructed various aspects of your career
like walking copies of Madonna as Postmodern Myth;
and scrambled to secure our place in the Letterman audience
when you appeared.
And then he was gone. Tragically and terrifyingly
suddenly, Jason passed away in the summer of 2002. The most
animated, intelligent, well-traveled, and gorgeous man we
had all known was gone. It was his request (in a typically
prescient statement during a year-long sojourn to teach
English in Japan) that his funeral, in addition to remaining
secular, feature your music. Not only did we honor that
request by playing Rain after one of the
many moving eulogies, but the distributed prayer cards featured
a verse of Sky Fits Heaven.
Mutual friends have suggested that Jason’s
Madonna-loving spirit entered me, as by the time Die
Another Day was released, my interest had been
markedly ramped up. I won’t bore (or scare?) you with
the intricacies of how deep my feelings run, but suffice
it to say so many posthumous moments of my relationship
with Jason are inexorably linked to you and what you meant
to him. During the Lisbon show, for example, you sang Crazy
For You directly to our section in one of the most
surreal moments of my life. After you had finished the song,
my boyfriend turned to me and said, “She was totally
singing to us. And Jason is right here with us, loving every
minute of it.” That moved me beyond words.
You will forever remind me of Jason and
the passion he had for your creativity and artistry. By
association, at the risk of sounding cliché, you’ve
really touched all of our lives.
For that, and for innumerable reasons, I thank you and
love you.
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