Between metaphysics and KFC, Michael Jackson's 'just another part of me'

MJ IN BLACK AND WHITE: Shot out in Little Five Points
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Who knew the King of Pop was a Kentucky Fried Chicken eatin', straight out the bucket finger-lickin' type of brother, as Magic Johnson revealed before mourners inside L.A.'s Staples Center on Tuesday.-

Even in death, it seems, Michael Jackson found a way to defy expectation.-

For nearly 50 years, the pop icon did such a good job of convincing us that he was no mere mortal, with his supernatural gifts and a seemingly innate ability to create a spectacle of himself whether onstage or off, that we never imagined a real man existed beneath all that mystique.-

But a public funeral attended by about 20,000, and simultaneously viewed by millions more around the world, did something the circus-like media coverage, which is now slowly starting to subside since his June 25 death, could not - it brought him down to earth.-

"Wasn't nothin' strange about your daddy," Al Sharpton preached from the podium-turned-pulpit, couching his criticism of the recent media coverage within a statement directed toward Jackson's three children on the front row. "It was strange what your daddy had to deal with."