Scandal unfair to parents of young fans

If you’re the parent of an average, prepubescent child, one who can’t seem to get enough pop music in her life, chances are you’re not looking forward to March.

What happens in March?

If you have to ask, then either your child doesn’t give a hoot about music, which is highly unlikely these days, or you simply don’t keep up with the important headlines the way you should. March, you see, is when Michael Jackson is scheduled to stand trial in civil court for allegedly having sexual contact with a boy.

So how does that affect me, you ask?

OK. Remember that song, “Heal the World,” that your child swooned to during the last overblown Super Bowl halftime show, the song that she couldn’t get out of her head for a month and sang at every opportunity? Well, Michael Jackson sang that song.

And remember that other heart-tugging hit song used as the theme for “Free Willy,” the recent movie about a killer whale and the boy who loves him? In case you weren’t paying attention when your child begged you to turn up the car radio every time the song came on, Michael Jackson was the voice behind that one, too.

Michael Jackson — he of the falsetto voice, the ghostly face, the oiled tendrils and the baffling crotch-grabbing compulsion. In the few years since you became a parent, this most eccentric of all modern superstars has managed to warble, yelp and moonwalk his way into your child’s tender heart. Not only did he win the kids by his song-and-dance talents, he did it by convincing them that he was a child himself — innocent, pure, and bewildered as a fawn in the hurly burly of the grown-up world.

Now we, the parents of his young fans, are faced with the nasty task of having to explain to them that their spindly, spangled hero might actually have touched more than just the hearts of young boys. God help us.

I’m not suggesting that the Gloved One did anything of the sort; that’s for investigators and the courts to decide. I hope his accusers really are lying for profit, as Jackson insists they are. But whether the allegations are true or not doesn’t seem to matter at the moment. The galloping publicity over Jackson’s alleged activities has brought the problem graphically home to parents everywhere. Our responsibility now, it seems to me, is to do some honest damage control until the whole thing blows over.

When the stories began trickling out a while ago, I became curious to know what my 8-year-old daughter saw in the guy.

“Why do you like Michael Jackson?” I asked her one day.

As she pondered, I imagined her recalling the hundreds of children singing on stage with Jackson at the Super Bowl, the TV stories of Jackson’s fairy-tale private playground called Neverland, and the smiling faces of the terminally-ill children he invited there to brighten their remaining days. So when my daughter said, “Because he likes children so much,” I wasn’t surprised.

Yet as the stories about Jackson have grown more sordid, promising that the trial will be nothing less than a media circus, I hope I never have to tell my daughter, “Well, yes, Michael does like children. He likes them a lot, in fact, but in a … well, in a different kind of way.”

Yikes! I can hear one little girl’s bubble bursting already.

This whole sleazy issue is terribly unfair to parents. After all, we’ve already been through it with Pee Wee Herman, that other wildly popular children’s performer who turned the tables on us. Pee Wee, if you remember, kept his hands to himself, which is illegal in an X-rated movie theater with people around.

The kids and I got through that scandal unscathed, although spending Saturday morning with them in Pee Wee’s Playhouse never felt quite as comfortable for me. Whenever Pee Wee’s oddball neighbors would drop in for an imaginary meal, I suspected them all of bizarre ritualistic behavior. When Pee Wee talked to his furniture, which he named Chairey and Globey, I viewed it as the ravings of a diseased mind.

Then came Madonna, who serenaded our children with misty memories of playgrounds lost while indulging her lurid sexual fantasies in that idiotic picture book with the metal covers.

Now it’s Michael Jackson. As he hides out in a place called Neverland, trying to kick a drug habit, several people so far have come forward to say they’ve got dirty little secrets to reveal.

In the spirit of Christmas, allow me to say “God bless us, everyone.” As modern parents, we could use the help.

Tom Weber is on vacation. His next column will appear on Jan. 7.