Thirty-three years ago today, Michael Jackson walked out in front of a packed stadium in São Paulo, Brazil. It was the first of two shows at Morumbi Stadium, on October 15 and October 17, 1993. Wikipedia lists 210,000 tickets sold across the two nights.
That’s a lot of people. And somewhere in all that noise, on one of those nights, a little boy was standing right next to him.
His name was Junior Lima. He was 9 years old, born back in April 1984. The whole thing started before the shows even began, when Junior was invited to greet Michael at the door of his plane the moment he landed in Brazil.
Then came the bigger ask. The promoter who brought Michael to Brazil happened to be a friend of Junior’s dad. He wanted to know if the boy would take sign language lessons. Not for fun. For a reason.
Junior would stand beside Michael during one song and sign the words in Brazilian Sign Language.
The song was “Heal the World.”
The song he signed, the way Michael first shared it with the world
Before you picture that night in São Paulo, it helps to hear the song itself. This is Michael’s own video for “Heal the World,” the gentle one with the children.
Now imagine a 9-year-old signing those same words next to him, live, in front of a stadium that full.
Junior is honest about how it went. “I definitely made a lot of mistakes,” he said years later. He was a kid. Who wouldn’t?
He grew up to be famous in his own right. Junior became half of Sandy & Junior, one of the biggest pop acts Brazil has ever had, with over 22 million albums sold.
But here’s the part that still bothers him. He has never seen a single photo of that night on stage with Michael. Not one. He’s called it “one of the biggest frustrations of my life.” He’s even asked fans who were at the second show to dig through their old pictures and check.
What “Heal the World” looked like live on that same tour
There’s no known clip of Junior’s moment anywhere online. But this is “Heal the World” performed on the very same Dangerous tour, filmed in Bucharest in 1992, so you can see how Michael staged it with children all around him.
Watch it and you’ll see why a little boy from Brazil still wishes he had just one photo of his own night.
And if you were at that second show in São Paulo in 1993, he’d still love to know what’s hiding in your old shoebox of pictures.