I remember watching this live, as it were - head on hands laying on blue green shag carpet in front (don't be so close - you'll ruin your eyes!) of a television (and record player with stereo speakers) that was a piece of furniture.
I didn’t really know who David Bowie was- I was not the hippest 11 year old - but had always liked Bing like my father who had passed a couple months before…maybe that’s why this stuck with me.
But even I knew that the moment was, well, momentously surreal - clearly the two people on the tv were humans but they seemed like they could possibly have been from different species.
I was confirmed in this when one of my older (and now much much older - Merry Christmas!) sisters - she knew about Bowie - said "what the hell?" or something to that effect.
And they - some people wonder how but that discounts their professionalism, their raw talent, and the fact that when Bing first came up he was considered quite the L'Enfant Terrible himself and followed all music surprisingly closely in part because he owned a chunk of Ampex, the reel-to-reel recorder company- did this and it was great.
Merry Christmas Everyone!
Merry Christmas, Tom!