missbhavens: danielleh: Watching this was the...

missbhavens:

danielleh:

Watching this was the only time the National Anthem has made me cry ever in my life. She just came out in a sweatsuit, walked up to the mic, sang the living shit out of this song, and walked away.

Addiction is sad.
Forty-eight is young.

For reals. Whitney Houston was never really my “thing”, yet somehow she was everyone’s “thing” and somehow I know all the words to all her big hits. I will never forget this. Giants/Bills? And Whitney Houston? During wartime? Are you effing kidding me with this?

This was epic. I had gotten a job hostessing in a TGI Friday’s on 55th and Park and the staff decided to watch the Superbowl at a freakin’ Blarney Stone on the East side. The sort of bar with steam-tables filled with corned beef and cabbage and breadrolls. Time stopped when she sang this. Old dude manning the beef station dropped his carving knife on the floor. Everyone was standing. The outrageous effortlessness of it. The Star Spangled Banner? The most difficult song in the universe?

Like it was nothing. Belted it out with all the sincerity in her body and waltzed away like “Just another Sunday.” You can’t even see her breathing.

God damn, it was perfect.

And the Star Spangled Banner has yet to be never been sung this perfectly again.

I didn’t even want to watch this because I knew what I was going to see and how I was going to feel about it, and I was right. I don’t expect to encounter this kind of talent again in my lifetime, it’s just too rare. Goddamn it, Whitney. You made it look so easy. And then you made it look so hard.