In two decades covering weird news, few evenings were more bizarre than the night I sat in temple with the one and only Michael Jackson. R.I.P. In Peace Michael
It was 1999, and I was working as a producer for ABC News.com, when Melissa Rubenstein, a publicist who owed me a favor, called in this tip.

His videos “here”

His life and the true face of him “here”

“Don’t make me sorry I told you,” she said, warning that I could observe the king of pop as he attended the Carlebach Shul on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for his first experience in a Jewish house of worship.
“Just observe,” she said. “If you do anything else, if you disrupt the service, you’ll pay.”
I had just a few minutes to get there. This was to be an unannounced event. I called my girlfriend, broke our date, and dashed up Broadway.
And there he was in a black fedora, dark sunglasses, a red silk shirt and iridescent tie praying among 150 of New York’s most religious Jews.
The unnatural red glow of Jackson’s lips made my pulse race. It was just like MTV, only he was standing amid a sea of bearded men in traditional garb, praying in Hebrew. Strangely, Jackson was the only African-American, and still the whitest man in temple.
As the rabbis chanted, the King of Pop mouthed amen at all the right moments, almost tearfully. Walt Disney would have been proud. The most plastic man alive looked so lifelike. I gazed up, searching for answers, and elbowed closer, hoping for an autograph.
Was it really so strange? Jackson was a man who lived a fad a minute. One minute he was sleeping in an oxygen tent, the next he was buying the Elephant Man’s bones, and taking plastic surgery to places no one wanted to see.