[note: this will probably be way more disjointed than usual, for reasons that i'm sure will become obvious.]
i think i was about 7 or 8 when i saw "purple rain" for the first time. my mother was dead and i was staying with my mother's best friend, who had a daughter around my age (we'll refer to her as rb for this story) that was also my best friend. rb and i shared a room, we went to the same school, we liked the same music - we weren't so much inseparable as we were...oh, i don't know. we were best friends even though we didn't get along all the time but we made it work.
somehow, rb's older brother had a copy of "purple rain" and we all watched it one day after school. yes, ladies and gentlemen, the first time i saw this movie was on a bootleg and it is entirely possible that it was a bootleg betamax. yes, i am that old. shut up. was i old enough to be watching purple rain? absolutely not. rb and i both knew her brother was doing us a major favor that we couldn't tell anyone about. imagine going to school the next day wanting to tell everyone that you'd seen this movie but you knew word would somehow get home and then everyone would catch hell. instead, we just giggled about it to ourselves and i have a vague memory of us playing records backwards and wearing some godawful paisley (it was the 80s, remember - we didn't know any better) and having a great time.
fast forward to high school. my friends and i were old enough to be left home alone to watch "graffiti bridge" and delve deeper into our prince fandom. i met kb after i transferred schools midway through my junior year. our circle of friends would sit together at lunch and/or in whatever classes we had together. i worked in the principal's office my senior year during a free period and i would totally forge passes to get kb and the crew out of classes.
kb was a year behind me and he was definitely our little brother, though i'm sure he harbored crushes on at least one or more of us. the summer after i graduated, kb and i made a pact that if we were both single in 2010, we'd find each other and get married and listen to "purple rain" as many times as we could stand it. this was 1994. 2010 seemed really far away to us back then.
hey, remember when i got divorced in 2010? if i was on facebook, i'm sure i would've found kb years ago and though i'm not convinced that we would've dated, let alone gotten married, i can pretty much guarantee that we'd be listening to "purple rain" as much as we could stand it.
and then there was last thursday. honestly, i'm still in shock. i totally had to leave my desk a couple of times that day to go cry in the bathroom. i've only listened to "purple rain" twice since then. that song, both on its own and in the movie, makes me weepy on a good day, so needless to say i'm still having trouble getting through the song without flat out bawling. y'all have been so great, though, with the emails and the tweets and the texts to check up on me and i love you guys for it.
km reminded me of an outing we took to wrigleyville one night b/c i wanted to try to win tickets for what i think was the musicology tour. beer pong may have been involved. i think someone left their card at the bar and had to go back the next day. none of us won, but the fact that i had this crazy idea of winning prince tickets and managed to rope some of y'all into coming along on this pursuit says something. it says a lot, actually. sometimes we do crazy things in the name of friendship and the shit just makes sense in that moment so you go with it.
i wound up seeing prince twice on that tour, both here and in dallas. dallas was first and i was by myself and when "purple rain" started, i went into full ugly cry mode. i remember looking around and everyone in my immediate section was caught up somehow. there was a moment being had and i hesitate to call it spiritual for everyone, but it sure as hell was spiritual for me.
there's power in that, i think, and i like to think that prince knew and understood the kind of power he had and toyed with us anyway, the bastard. i still can't believe he's gone. i can't even say or type his name and "dead" in the same sentence because denial is not just a river in egypt.
jb (yes, i'm just using initials left and right in this post and you will deal, lol) tweeted me yesterday about a prince tribute on chirp radio. i managed to catch the end of it during my ride to work and the last song was "sometimes it snows in april." i sat in the lobby of my office building sniffling and wiping tears because that's another song that hits me in the feels even on my best days, and i hadn't listened to it since the news broke and dammit i am totally getting teary again now. fuck.
anyway...apparently the universe decided i needed to hear that song twice yesterday, b/c i stayed up to watch d'angelo's tribute on jimmy fallon's show and i have the video playing in the background while i type this b/c i'm gonna link to it and christ jesus i am about to start bawling again. hold on.
saying "thank you" to prince doesn't seem like nearly enough and yet i feel like that's all i have right now. thank you for music that has impacted me for 30 years and counting. thank you for giving voice to emotions that i'm sometimes unable or unwilling to express. thank you for sharing your genius even when i couldn't always understands your methods or your madness. thank you for "purple rain." thank you.
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