Beyond the Hype

My colleagues and friends expected me to run into a beehive of Jackon fans and policemen when I left my apartment a few blocks from Staples this morning. It was a piece of cake. I stopped at the nearby Starbucks to fuel up, and then walked closer to the barricades at Flower Street, a block from Staples. The crowds were sparse, but vendors were pushing shirts and posters every step of the way -- it was the most souvenir hawking I'd seen since my trip to the old city in Jerusalem a couple of years ago.

I asked one t-shirt vendor how business was.

"Light," he said. His wife said, "They said there would be a million people here."

I later asked a policeman, "Is this the crowd you expected?" He said it wasn't close. I mentioned that cops seemed to outnumber fans last night, and he said he too had heard that. I asked how they came up with the estimate of a million people, and he said the city had extrapolated that from past megafunerals such as Lady Di and Elvis.

"But I looked those up last night," I said. "Elvis had only 80,000 people and Lady Di had a quarter million. You weren't going to beat that."

"Well, it's always possible the crowd will get bigger later," he said. "Or maybe they stayed at home because they were told not to come."

"Not likely," I said. "If they came to LA for this, they at least would have come out last night to pay their respects, before the blockade. But they didn't."

I wished him a peaceful day and rode off. The city and the media both overestimated interest in this culmination of twelve days of non-stop coverage in America's quasi-royal family -- a family that sadly believes itself to be a bit more royal than it really is.

Above and below: Lighter business for opportunistic vendors than they'd been led to expect