“I’m a ballerina. My junk food vocabulary is limited to baklava and pancakes.”
I scooped up a handful of popcorn with Goobers, and I have never looked back. To this day, when Gia and I go to the movies, I can’t help myself. I have to throw Goobers in the popcorn. I don’t dump in the whole box of Goobers like he always did, because all that sugar would send Gia bouncing off the walls, but I love how excited she gets when she discovers one.
“Mama! You gave me a Goober!” She squeezes my arm in the dark, and I think of my dear friend and what it means to be hit by The Thunderbolt.
See the man cry as the city condemns where he lives
Memories die but the taxes he’ll still have 2 give…
Within weeks of Prince’s death, the estate announced that Paisley Park would be open to the public as a tourist attraction, and just the other day, I read that Warner Bros. would be releasing the first of many recordings from Prince’s infamous “vault” at Paisley Park. This thing actually is a vault, like in a bank, filled with fully mastered music, most of which has never been heard outside the studio. I’m conflicted about this, because I’ve heard some of the music, and it’s amazing. It should be heard by the world. But during his lifetime, he fought so hard to keep it out of the corporate pipeline. He loved the evolving technology that would make it possible for him to sell music—or give it away—directly to fans.
I understood the need to pay the enormous cost of upkeep on Paisley Park, but it bothered me, and I didn’t even know what that meant—the “estate.” Family, I suppose. Half-siblings. Omarr, whom I came to know over the years, and his sister Tyka, the first person he named when I asked him, “Who are the people you truly love?” But I’d mostly heard Prince speak of his coworkers as family—Sheila E, Morris Day, Wendy and Lisa, and his other bandmates—and I came to think of them as my own extended family as well.
??five
The first time I went to prom, I went with a punker who wore a dress. You have to have some kind of weirdness to interest me. We weren’t dating, just friends. I think I may have loaned him my eyeliner. The last prom I went to, I went with my friend Papu, a big Hawaiian kid, who was very understanding about the fact that I could be there for only thirty minutes. Just long enough for us to have our picture taken. My parents were waiting outside to take me to a gig. Prince thought this was hilarious.
That last year I lived in Germany, I was the go-to belly dancer in Wiesbaden, Frankfurt, and Mainz. I had friends at school—mostly my chorus and drama people—but I was known as a good girl. I didn’t go to games or pep rallies. I didn’t even eat lunch at school, because I spent half the school day at the state theater, taking ballet classes that were counted as class hours, which allowed me to graduate a year early. All I wanted to do was dance in Cairo. Only my good friends Stephanie and Allison knew where I’d been over the holidays. I liked keeping a low profile about it. The letters and tapes were deeply personal. I didn’t like the idea of being questioned about it. I didn’t like the assumptions I knew people would make.
The night of the thirty-minute prom, I was also double booked to dance. The first gig was a slight departure from my usual belly dance/flamenco fusion. This was a full-on flamenco thing—a showcase for belly dancers supporting other belly dancers—which I’d agreed to do months earlier. By the time I realized that prom was that night and my professional certification exam was the next morning, advertising had gone out, and Mama was getting nervous about the time frame. I was the hardest working belly dancer in the show, and she was worried that I’d perform some underprepared dance and not look good for the belly dance community.
She’d always had more of a Spanish flair, so she took an old costume of hers, altered it to fit me—a gorgeous red dress with a red bolero. I had studied and watched the dance but never got into the zapateo part of it, but I tried on the outfit the night before prom and loved it. I asked her to let me have the big Spanish peineta that women always wear with a huge flower and a manton, the lace Spanish shawl. The more stuff I asked for, the more nervous she got.
“When are you planning to rehearse this?” she kept asking.
“I’ve been visualizing it,” I said. “When I’m in bed and working on ballet and talking on the phone.”