Didn’t get tickets to see Michael Jackson perform this summer? Never mind – the next best thing happens tomorrow.

Now, since Michael Jackson is dead, the next best thing clearly involves standing in a giant arena for hours at a time wedged between a hysterically weeping hermaphrodite with a sparkly glove fetish and someone dressed up as golden-era Bubbles while Michael Jackson’s coffin remains a speck on a stage several hundred feet away, but that doesn’t seem to have put people off.

Michael Jackson’s memorial service takes place at the Staples Centre tomorrow. And 1.6 million people have inexplicably registered for tickets.

Remember him for what he was, not what he became. That’s been the sort of unofficial mantra surrounding Michael Jackson’s death over this last week, and for good reason. Michael Jackson’s death is much sadder when you think of him as the artist behind, say, Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough rather than, say, the ghoul-faced drug addict who made children drink wine from baby bottles and lived in a nightmarish Scooby-Doo villain’s dilapidated fairground.

So don’t remember Michael Jackson for what he became. And since, in the last week, he’s become a funny-looking corpse in a box, that’s definitely not how you should remember him. But that hasn’t exactly stopped over one and a half million people from doing exactly that. Tomorrow, Michael Jackson’s public memorial service will take place at the Staples Centre in LA. And even though nobody really knows what form it’s going to take, organisers have been inundated with enquiries. EW reports:

The registration process for free tickets to Michael Jackson’s public memorial service has closed. Now AEG, the company behind the memorial, is charged with the unenviable task of sorting through 1.6 million registers, “scrubbing” all entries to eliminate duplicates and those suspected to have been made by auto-entry, and randomly drawing 8,750 tickets.

It’s a complicated process – those selected to win tickets will be informed by email, then invited to a secret off-site location to pick the tickets up, provided that they remember the secret handshake, 25 of the 30 secret passwords and can convincingly perform a piece of shadow-puppetry based around the theme of solitude. They will then be blindfolded, driven to the middle of the desert and if they can make it back before the service starts, they’re in.

Don’t worry if you don’t get tickets for Michael Jackson’s memorial service because, as we’re sure you’ve already spotted, it’s been promoted by AEG. And since AEG is clearly desperate to recoup the millions in comeback money it lost when Michael Jackson died, we’re fairly sure that the memorial service will end up being released as a cash-in DVD, right between the cash-in DVD of Michael’s last rehearsal and the cash-in DVD that’s just a close-up of one of Michael Jackson’s shoes while a sad piano version of Man In The Mirror plays in the background.

Still, on the plus side at least this is it. After fans have been given the chance to say goodbye to Michael Jackson, the story will end and he can rest in peace. Obviously there’ll still be blanket coverage of his autopsy results, the drawn-out attempts to decipher his will, the endless squabbles over his desperate financial situation, the frighteningly complex custody battle for his kids and an increasing number of sensational tell-all interviews where people list all the awful things that Michael Jackson did during his life, but… oh, actually, never mind.

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