By Lexi Kent-Monning, Paste Magazine | Prince noticed that I had painted my nails purple when I first shook his hand. We were at the bottom of an L-shaped staircase inside a house in Altadena, which opened to a massive room full of camera equipment and extras hoping to make it in front of those cameras. Despite the pain from his hip, he stood to shake my hand — because one of his delightful paradoxes was how traditional he was about manners, despite his history of assless pants. He shook my hand, then softly twisted my wrist, as though to kiss the top of my hand, so he could nod his approval at my nails—a slow head bow with his eyes closed, almost a blessing. At 5’2”, we were also the same height and, though he didn’t mention it, I like to think he noticed it.
It was almost midnight and, after weeks of not being sure he would show up, Prince was here to shoot an episode of New Girl. It all started with an email to my boss, Zooey Deschanel. Prince said he loved the show and wanted to be on it. We were sure it was a prank. The email was almost too on the nose, written in total Prince-speak, like “Would like 2 B” for “would like to be.” Emails were exchanged, more official phone calls between his management team and the New Girl production office were placed, and it turned out to really be Prince. On long tour bus rides, he and his band, 3rdeyegirl, apparently watched two things: “New Girl and the news.” Scripts were written and sent to Prince, to which he responded with notes and even re-wrote parts of it himself (yes, all sentences with “2,” “4,” “U,” even “NRG” for “energy”). Wardrobe boxes of clothing started appearing at the New Girl production offices from Paisley Park. All of us were sworn to complete and absolute secrecy. Nothing official—it was more like everyone on set knew about it through whispers, and each whisper was prefaced by “This doesn’t leave this room, but…” In the month leading up to shooting the episode, I went to a wedding that included a ceremonial unveiling of a Prince poster and still kept a complete poker face. Never had anything felt more sacred than keeping Prince a secret. We honored his inclination towards the element of surprise, popping up where nobody expected him. Nobody was willing to risk ruining it.
Purple Rain was released a few months after I was born in 1984, so I’ve never had to live without it. My big sister and I danced to his music as children, wearing scarves, headbands and ruffles from our dress-up box. The aforementioned assless pants, worn during the MTV Video Music Awards in 1991, were on every newspaper cover, blurred in varying degrees, becoming an immediate subject of political debate. In 1994, when he started going by a symbol instead of the name we all knew him as—in a public protest against his record company—he sent computer disks with the downloadable symbol to newspapers so they could use it when writing about him, which they all did. We all drew that symbol on our notebooks in grade school.
In 2004, every single person I knew would quote from various parts of the Prince skit from Chappelle’s Show—in which Charlie Murphy told a story about meeting the Purple One at a club in the 80s, him beating Murphy and his friends in a basketball game and Prince serving them pancakes for breakfast. A couple of months after that sketch came out, Prince so dominated the all-star lineup of a tribute to George Harrison for a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction that the New York Times published an oral history of his guitar solo.
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Read more of this delightful her-story here:
https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/prince/princes-hand-warmers?
Lexi Kent-Monning is an alumna of the Tyrant Books workshop Mors Tua Vita Mea in Sezze Romano, Italy, taught by Giancarlo DiTrapano and Chelsea Hodson.
Photo: Prince
Prince’s Hand Warmers
