Last night, Tom and I were at Target Center, a few blocks from home in downtown Minneapolis, for the Timberwolves/New York Knicks game. The sports figure of the moment (this month's Tim Tebow) is Jeremy Lin of the Knicks, and he wasn't overly impressive in this game but the Knicks won anyway as the Wolves collapsed in the fourth quarter. This is life as you know it, if you are a Wolves fan.
And this is how people communicate in 2012: I was checking out Facebook on my Blackberry occasionally during the game, and friends' posts kept popping up saying that Whitney Houston was dead. These days, rumors like that travel fast in the cyber world and are usually wrong. This one was right.
Whitney Houston's peak was in the '80s and the early '90s, and she was a superstar. After that, she became a tabloid tragedy and a lost soul.
And, as I sat there in Target Center digesting all this, I remembered that my sister Joan had brought me to a Whitney concert right there in that arena, and we sat not far from where my Wolves tickets are, just a few feet away. It was in the early '90s, the "I'm Your Baby Tonight" World Tour. I wasn't the biggest fan, but her concert was enjoyable and I recognized the power of her voice. Her style was just not my style. My style would have been more the style of Whitney's mom, singer Cissy Houston, or Whitney's cousin, Dionne Warwick -- all their '60s work.
What a sad story. How devastating it must be for her family. And for her fans, who haven't forgotten her.
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