The Christmas of 1984 was one of my most memorable, musical and magical.
It was the year I got audiocassette tapes of Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual and Madonna's Like a Virgin.
And Prince and the Revolution's Purple Rain.
My good Catholic parents wouldn't allow me to see Prince's R-rated movie of the same name. (I'd later see it at a slumber party where the much cooler parents paid for cable TV. And I've now seen it so many times, thanks to my own TV subscriptions, I can quote full lines -- "You have to purify yourself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka!" -- of lovably lame dialogue.) But they let me have the soundtrack. And they let me keep it, which means clearly they never listened closely to Track No. 5 -- the last one on well-worn Side One after "Let's Go Crazy," "Take Me With U," "The Beautiful Ones" and "Computer Blue" -- about notorious Nikki.
Purple Rain was my gateway into the reign of Prince Rogers Nelson. My collection, thanks to those Columbia House Club memberships and their dozen tapes for a penny offers, grew quickly. I'd go back into his discography and get older albums like 1999 (1982) and Prince (1979). And I'd buy -- and memorize -- every album from Around the World in a Day (1985) to Diamonds and Pearls (1991).
I heard about Prince's death -- Thursday at his home in Minnesota -- an hour before I began writing this. The first half hour, I spent Googling for some glimmer of hope that it was just a hoax. The second half hour, I agonized about a lighthearted comment I had written about the 57-year-old singer in last Sunday's column. It was written when I knew him to be alive and well, and now my ill-timed remark about one of my all-time favorite musicians would be published after his death. Sigh.
So I hope to make it up to him here. But I feel he and I are cool. I'm confident that over the years, I have proven my devotion. Beginning with that seventh-grade short, uneven haircut -- an attempt to look like his girlfriend, drummer Sheila E. from her Romance 1600 album cover. And there was the time I pleaded with my piano teacher Mrs. Goethe to let me play "Raspberry Beret" at a piano recital (she let me; after giving into my "We Are the World" appeal the year before, she accepted I was not destined to be a classical pianist).
Then there was the time I was miserably ill but still showed up at his Barton Coliseum show, stayed the whole time and then got stuck in traffic after the event. It was January 1998, and I was determined to party like it was 1999 with Prince in person. My favorite memory as written in my review:
The best display of his humor happened in the second set when, adorned in a ruffled raspberry-colored suit, he attempted to play "Darling Nikki," the risque song from Purple Rain about the woman in the hotel lobby who didn't use magazines for reading. Four notes into the song, the audience roared and The Artist, mock-horrified at the audience's wantonness, walked away from his piano. This happened three times before he actually followed through with the song.
"Ooooooh. I'm telling your mama!" he chided after the audience cheered after a particularly bawdy line.
As he would say, "But it was Saturday night, I guess that makes it all right."
As I write this, nothing feels all right. How could the man who created the soundtrack to the first half of my life -- "Delirious," "When Doves Cry," "I Would Die 4 U," "U Got the Look," "Kiss," "Alphabet Street," "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man" -- not be here for the rest of it?
I'm reminded of the lyrics from one of my very favorite Prince songs from his 1986 album Parade, the genius soundtrack that deserved a better movie than Under the Cherry Moon. It's titled "Sometimes It Snows in April."
Sometimes it snows in April
Sometimes I feel so bad
Sometimes I wish life was never ending,
And all good things, they say, never last.
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What's in a Dame is a weekly report from the woman 'hood. You can hear Jennifer on Little Rock's KURB-FM, B98.5 (B98.com), from 5:30-9 a.m. Monday through Friday.
Style on 04/26/2016