No argument from either of them. They lived happily ever after for many years.
Back in Minnesota, I walked into the first rehearsal and was stunned to find that the band was like a skeleton crew. Several people had been let go, including Tony, Damon, and Kirk, who’d been with Prince for almost ten years. Kirk came back later on as a drummer, and Prince tried to orchestrate a soft landing for them all with Goldnigga, an album that gave them a way forward without him. Truthfully, I wasn’t a huge fan of it—particularly the song “Johnny,” which is this crude song about condoms. The first time I heard it, I wrinkled my nose and said, “What’s up with that? My father’s name is John. Your father’s name is John. I don’t like that.”
I couldn’t understand why Prince would let TDK go. To me, they seemed like such an integral part of his vision for the band. When I asked him about it, he said, “I don’t want guys onstage with me. Just you.”
“Just me? I don’t get it. Why would you change it when—”
“Because it changes. It will always change. Maybe next year I won’t have a band at all.”
“Okay, but from a technical standpoint—how do you expect me to do all that myself?”
“You’ll learn,” he said.
He’d already lined up a series of choreographers to work with me for five weeks. After that, sink or swim, we’d be on tour again.
I trained hard for the rest of the summer, moving in ways I’ve never moved before, thinking about who I could be as a dancer in an entirely different light. In a strange way, hip-hop and belly dancing are natural cousins, because of the muscle isolation that’s necessary to both, so nothing about the choreography felt weird. The only thing that scared me was the stamina it would take to motor through that two-hour show as the only dancer onstage.
One day during rehearsal, Prince looked at me and said, “You know what would be cool?”
“What…”
It always worried me a little when a sentence started this way.
“I was just thinking about this dancer with bangs like—”
“No,” I said. “You don’t want to see me with bangs. I tried bangs when I was twelve, and I feel like I’m still kind of emotionally scarred from it. They won’t lay down straight. As soon as I start sweating, they curl up into weird little devil horns.”
“You’d have them chemically straightened. They’d be straight.”
“Maybe,” I hedged. “I guess they’ll grow back.”
The next day, I flew to LA to have a particular hairdresser cut and straighten my bangs, and much to my surprise, I loved the look. I couldn’t wait to get home and show Prince. When I stood in front of him, feeling like Bettie Page and Bette Davis and Joan Crawford rolled into one, he studied my face carefully.
“Wouldn’t it be cool,” he said, “if they were cut like a V?”
“What do you mean?”
“So they’d come to a point here”—he touched his index finger just above the bridge of my nose—“at the third eye.”
I suppose it’s a demonstration of my trust in him. I let him take me over to the hair salon at his house. (Yes, of course he had a hair salon at his house. Doesn’t everyone?) He stood me against the counter.
“Close your eyes and stand very still.”
It was a strangely sensual experience. I felt his slow, deliberate breath on my face and then the bright coolness of the sharp scissor blade on my forehead, one side and then the other.
“Okay, take a look.”
I opened my eyes and turned toward the mirror. He was right.
My eyebrows naturally go to kind of a zazzy place, and I had them plucked and penciled to accentuate that, but now the subtle but distinct V created a cooler, edgier version of me—a look I’d never seen on any other girl. Probably because I was looking at a woman.
The Act II Tour started in England in July 1993: twenty-seven shows in twelve countries in less than seven weeks. I’d never worked so hard in my life, and the harder I worked, the more fun it was. Prince was very competitive and liked to see us compete with each other, so every once in a while, before the show, he’d call out, “Funk Night!” This meant that whoever did the funkiest thing would get a bonus of a thousand or maybe three thousand dollars, sometimes even five thousand. So we were highly motivated to get out there and get funky. People did crazy things, often prompted by Prince’s come-on: “Wouldn’t it be cool if…”
I remember somebody climbing high into the scaffolding one night, scaring the daylights out of everyone. Tommy Barbarella used to fly around on a wire harness.
“Wouldn’t it be cool,” Prince said, “if somebody just like, shaved their head onstage?”