Six kids went out on the ice that day: Michael, Marlon and Randy Jackson, plus three of the Brady girls. The smallest was Susan Olsen, the blonde with the pigtails who played Cindy on “The Brady Bunch.”
“I only had one outing with him,” she said. “We went ice skating. Michael and Marlon and Randy and Maureen and Eve and me.”
Maureen was Maureen McCormick, TV’s Marcia. Eve was Eve Plumb, who played Jan. Susan played Cindy from 1969 to 1974 and voiced her again in the Saturday morning cartoon “The Brady Kids” from 1972 to 1974, so she knew what it was like to be a kid that everybody recognized. So did the boys she was skating with.
She told the story in a 2009 interview with Retroality.TV, around the time her book “Love to Love You Bradys” came out. The interviewer opened by saying the Brady kids had met Michael Jackson “briefly.” Susan corrected that right away.
“We more than met Michael Jackson,” she said. “He was sort of a friend.”
She didn’t oversell it, though. Maureen “knew him way better than me,” Susan said, and she thought Chris Knight, who played Peter, “stayed in touch with Michael.” Her own memory is that one afternoon at the rink.
What stuck with her was how easy he was to be around. “Michael was wonderful,” she said. He was “friends with us.” And the Brady kids liked him for a reason you might not expect from a boy whose records were all over the radio. “We liked him so much because he was so normal, that’s exactly why we liked him.”
He was “completely unfazed by celebrity,” she said. “He was like sunshine, he had such a lovely personality.”
She had one more word for him: “very humble.” That’s when she got to the question.
“I remember asking him who does your choreography, ’cause you sure dance good,” Susan said. It’s the kind of thing a kid blurts out after watching the Jackson 5 on TV.
“Choreographer, man? Those cost bread. We do it ourselves.”
Bread was the slang of the day for money. No hired dance coach, in other words, just the brothers working out their own steps. It’s a funny line from a kid who already had hit records, and Susan could still quote it decades later. He didn’t brag and he didn’t dodge. He just told her how it worked in his family.
The Bradys had their own go at music around then, and Susan was blunt about how that went. “We were supposed to be like the Jackson Five or the Osmonds,” she said, “except with no talent.”
Susan Olsen tells the ice skating story to Retroality.TV
This is an interview with Retroality.TV, posted on the interviewer’s own channel. Susan starts talking about Michael at about 0:06, lists everyone who went skating at about 0:21 and gets to her choreography question at about 1:34. The Michael part of the interview runs to about 2:47.
A few moments later in the interview, she sums up what she thought of him. “Listen to Michael Jackson, listen to him, he’s really good,” she said. Then came the part anyone who ever saw the Jackson 5 on TV would agree with: “Watch, look at him dance.”