Strange But True...
by Marty Barrett
Marty Barrett of The Orange Show! also performed with Mikey in BRO's Preservation

We are all aware of Mikey's philanthropy, attention-deflecting modesty, and fervent support of other people's art, but did you know that he is a flaxen-haired moppet?

That's the Mikey Dee I know, both of us sitting on Grand Dad's knee, bouncing up and down with coarse hair poking out of our pink little girls' tights, listening to some boy band and knowing that we were better at math than they were.

I think it was in '52 that Mikey Dee moved to our Levittown neighborhood. His dad was just back from the war - he'd spent the last seven years since the bomb dropped looking for parking - and Mikey Dee absorbed the sights and smells of our prefab housing development immediately, organizing commie witch hunts and fallout shelter parties with an aplomb hardly representative of other two-year-olds. Barely out of fetushood, Mikey Dee could be seen racing around our symmetrical streets, blond hair trailing behind him like Isadora Duncan's scarf and head, in a purple late-model Caddy convertible.

It wasn't until Sputnik was launched in '57 that I saw Mikey Dee again. There he was, feeding Snausages to Laika the space dog in almost no gravity or pants at all.

The 60's arrived with the Beatles and there the Dee was again. It is a testament to his selflessness that in February, 1964, he persuaded John and Paul, already avid fans of his, to substitute the word "Hand" for "Mikey Dee" on the Ed Sullivan Show, allowing even the Japanese to sing along.

And who was there at Woodstock passing out the brown acid? Sure as hell wasn't Mothra.

It was a feminist Mikey Dee who persuaded Gloria Steinem to burn her bra after she'd taken it off, rather than before, so that she wouldn't look, as he sagely explained, "too Buddhist."

And who could forget Mikey Dee in 1977, backstage in Detroit, patiently feeding blood squibs to Gene Simmons, who heretofore had been spitting Vaseline Intensive Care at the front row? Always a silent Svengali, Mikey Dee knew how to craft an image to a crystalline form.

Oh, there were the eighties and his failed basketball, ballroom dancing, and homoerotic vampire career, but even his low periods were uniformly fabulous. Who knew he was only twelve?

Fast forward to the nineties, where his triumphs with Acme Theatre are whispered of in the far corners of South Station, and his work as a scenester and golden-throated deejay have been better recounted elsewhere.

It is with sadness, then, that we now view him as the victim of jealous Fate, who has laid him low out of spite for not being as exquisite as he. Would you rather listen to Mikey's radio show or Fate's? We look forward to the day when he walks out onto the roof of the Spaulding Rehab Center and shouts, "Fuck you, cruel Fate! I am a Golden God!"

That's what we're all looking forward to.

Marty Barrett