Regarding Prince
One of my favorite Durham memories is of the 2011 Prince vs. Michael Jackson dance party on 9th Street. People who had danced to their music as adults in the 1980s were dancing with strangers who were born in the 1980s. It was a spectacle of sheer, shared joy. We “went crazy,” forgetting for an evening ways that Durhamites are divided from and taught to fear one another.
I was 16 when Purple Rain came to the theater in San Angelo, Texas. I am pretty sure I went to see it with a close friend from church and her sister. It was cheesy in just the right way, and Prince was the most beautiful person I had ever seen on the big screen. I had a crush on Han Solo when I was little, and I loved David Lee Roth’s devil-may-care ways on MTV. But Prince was a different universe of sexy. He conveyed in his music an unselfconscious joy-in-common that suggested to my 16-year-old virgin self an inkling of what sexual intimacy should optimally be. Read more
