It’s been over three weeks since Prince has been gone and my world is still rocked. I think everyone is still in shock and in perfect journalistic fashion the media has gone full steam ahead trying to destroy all that we believed to be true. Could he really have been such a master of deception? I think that we all want to remember him for his art but we live in a world of too much information and not enough mystery. Prince defied the game and was mystery at its finest and I loved that. Being from Minnesota my fascination with the Purple Reign started as a young girl. He and his band members would hang on the corner of 7th and Hennipin Avenue while I hung out of the top floor of my ballet studio watching, wishing I was older, cooler, and free to hang out with these rebellious teens.

Years later my first concert, as a preteen, would be Prince. It was there that he would introduce his third album DIRTY MIND, much to my father’s dismay. The deal was if my girlfriend, Tiffany, and I wanted to go to the concert my dad had to take us. At that time he had only released “FOR YOU” and “PRINCE” or as I liked to call it the, “I WANNA BE YOUR LOVER” LP. These albums were somewhat tame. Little did my dad know he was going to sing a song called “HEAD.” I can remember the horrified look in my father’s eyes, not knowing the meaning, I couldn’t understand why he was so uptight. It was an amazing concert with memories of a lifetime. I would grow up to see many other Prince concerts in much bigger venues, but that experience by far had the most impact. Prince said and expressed some of the things that we didn’t have the nerve to say but could most of the time relate to.

Ironically I would meet Prince, but not in Minneapolis, in Los Angeles in 1989. He saw me at a club and asked me to dance, afterwards, like the gentleman he was, he asked me for my number and called to ask me out. I said yes, shocker. He picked me up in Long Beach where I was living with my mother, and took me to the movies. He was obsessed, at the time, with the John Cusack movie”  SAY ANYTHING.” He thought it was very romantic and had seen it several times. We sat in the back of the movie theater like kids and I don’t remember much else. He never made a physical pass at me but his rap was tight and he loved to talk all night on the phone. He knew I had a boyfriend at the time and that tickled him to harass me about it and ask questions about my relationship. It all ended very abruptly, one because I think I was very young and immature and wasn’t interested in learning an instrument. His conversation always ended up being about music and ” did I want to learn an instrument.” Secondly, soon after me, he met, the older more sophisticated, Kim Basinger while doing the BATMAN SOUNDTRACK. Oh yeah and I had a boyfriend, I seemed to have forgotten about that. Boyfriend was not very happy with me, but would you give up an opportunity to go to the movies with Prince for a boyfriend? I think not! It was a nice memory and I always have had the warmest feelings towards him, not to mention he was my favorite artist. I have been listening to him ever since he passed until yesterday when Satelite XM radio channel 50 stopped playing nonstop Prince. It made me think that when people pass, whoever it is, eventually we all move on. The world just seems to keep spinning. However the footprint Prince left on our galaxy can never be forgotten. So I guess I’d have to say, musically, NOTHING COMPARES TO YOU PRINCE.