“Oh, absolutely.”
I touched her elbow and said, “I’m fine.” She saw the steady confidence in my eyes and took comfort in it. She could see that I wasn’t scared or unsure; I was there to hang out with the man, artist to artist. If you were going to connect with someone in a professional capacity, you would invite them to get together at either your home or your office, and when you’re on tour, your hotel room is both these things. I knew she’d have my back if anything went strange, but I was equally certain that’s not why I was there. Having sized things up to her satisfaction, Mama hugged me and headed home with Jan.
It was after midnight by this time, and I hadn’t eaten all day, but I was wired with adrenalin and wide awake.
“Are you sure I can’t get you anything?” he kept asking. “Water? Tea? Something to eat?”
I couldn’t imagine eating in that scenario, or possibly ever again, but the third or fourth time he asked, it occurred to me that maybe he wanted to eat something and didn’t want to be rude by eating in front of me, so I said, “Sure. Thanks.” He left me sitting alone in the bedroom and came back a few minutes later with a bowl of freshly popped popcorn, which he munched on while we sat cross-legged on the floor with pillows and watched the videotapes I’d brought.
One of the duties of the foo foo master was to set up a big black roadie case that held all kinds of audio visual equipment—a TV, VCRs, cassette and CD players, etc.—that Prince would need for reviewing performance tapes, watching movies, and working on one thing or another. I was relieved to see that it was outfitted with American equipment and electrical hookups; I’d had a moment of panic in the car, wondering if he’d be able to play my American tapes in a German hotel room. I set my stack of tapes on top of the roadie case: the long version of the rough cut I’d done for him, a talent show from school, a few random restaurant gigs, and other appearances.
He graciously watched them all, asking a thousand questions: What are those arm bands made of? Where’d your dad get those drums? When did you learn how to drop back so slow? How do you roll your belly like that? He was particularly interested in my journeys to Egypt, so I told him all about Madame Abla and Mohammed Ali Street in Cairo. As we worked through the stack of tapes, traveling backward in time, I told him about George Abdo and Amir and the dressed-to-the-nines ladies of Frauentag.
“How long have you been doing this dance?” he asked.
“Since I was three. When I was eight, I was on That’s Incredible! The world’s youngest professional belly dancer.”
“No way.”
“Yes! Way! Here—I brought the tape.” Mama would have been proud.
He fed the tape into the VCR. When it got to the bit about “the mystical, magical Princess Mayte,” he paused it and looked at me in surprise.
“Wait. Your name is Princess Mayte?”
“Yeah… it was.”
“Why did you change it?”
“Because I’m not a princess.”
“Yes, you are.” He stated this as a simple fact, looking me straight in the eye, and I suddenly felt a flush of pride mixed with genuine sadness that I’d somehow let that go.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I felt stupid.”
“You are! I mean, that’s a cool name.”
I laughed and took a few kernels of popcorn in my hand, not sure if the proper response was “thank you” or something else. He watched the rest of the tape while I sat there thinking how surrealistic the whole thing was.
“Do you do any other type of dance?” he asked.
I brought out some ballet tapes and a recent happening, which to this day I laugh about. My high school had put on a talent show, and I was known as the dancer, so the chorus class asked me to choreograph a number to Prince’s “Batdance” from the soundtrack of Tim Burton’s 1989 version of Batman. I have to laugh now, because this thing was so bad, but I was very proud of my choreography, and he was extremely sweet about it. When it was over, I ejected the tape and went back to my wheelhouse, the pieces I was most proud of, the pieces I knew would get me another contract in Cairo.
It was closing in on four in the morning—pretty late-night, even for those of us on Germany time—and I was starting to feel bleary-eyed.
“Maybe we could hang out again tomorrow,” he said, and I said we could.