Where Were You?

I honestly had no idea that Mattel had started pimping out the most obscure of its Barbie spin-offs - her baby sister Kelly, the doll for people who found Skipper too stimulating - but seeing that they have, I can't think of anything more fabulous than these faintly terrifying tiny-tot Charlie's Angels.

They're probably not the most apropos of ways in which to note this sad day, but much as one might revere the memory of the late Miss Farrah Fawcett, it has to be admitted that hers is not a name all that closely associated with quiet good taste to start with.

In any case, she left us five years ago today.  Where were you?

We were in Berlin, of all places.  Like much of the world, the news of her passing came to us as a second wave of bad tidings that day, that inexplicably popular pop star who also died that day having hit the headlines at nearly the same time.  We sat in the executive lounge of the hotel, having a complimentary cocktail or four before going on to meet up with friends.  They had suggested the location, which turned out to be a particularly - even by Berlin's standards, which are not low - intimidating leather bar.

The usual sense of menace that I would have expected, however, was cut pretty significantly by the fact that many of the regulars were intermittently getting teary, and that the music was more or less "Pretty Young Thing" on a loop.  So it was a memorable night, and not just for the moments that I had to spend convincing bathos-prone German leather queens that Mr. Muscato was in fact taken and no, they would not be coming back to the hotel with us.

Five years on, Michael Jackson seems to me at least a fading memory; Farrah, though - well, we'll always have Charlie.  And I really might be having to find my own set of Kelly's Angels.