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As the lights dimmed slightly across the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles it felt as if the audience all held their breath for just a moment. What were they all going to bare witness to? What exactly was this moment going to look like? They had all heard so much, their collective imagination ran wild with the possibilities as they all focused on the back of the perfectly still figure in middle of the stage. As the lights came up the iridescent colors of blue and green covering his slight form came to life while purple tears seem to streak down the backdrop and with a nonchalant turn he was facing the crowd.
Prince appears to take a cautious glance around the room and a deep, confidence instilling breath as he finishes the first line of Purple Rain. The performance on the evening of January 28, 1985 shows us both the well planned side of Prince and the more raw side that we have all come to admire and even love. The stage setup, a plan to visually isolate each person onto their own island reflecting the nearly mournful isolation in music; a plan well executed indeed. Some of his stage movements, and expressions that evening, clearly deliberate to reflect the emotion of the performance from the movie of the same name. But where Prince excels in this performance, just as he did in so many others, was in what appears to be the unrehearsed. The brief expressions of passion and focus that flash across his face as he falls head first into that mesmerizing guitar solo. Or the instances where he bends down closer to his guitar, almost as if he wishes he could truly become one with his instrument.
Prince's performance at the 1985 American Music Award reminds me a great deal of what we all go through as writers. We all start with some form of a plan and we hope that those planned highlights in our stories will translate just as beautifully to the page as they appear in our mind. We wait patiently to see if the read spots those moments we looked so forward to writing in our stories. But there is an amazing thing that happens when the parts we didn't plan, the parts that came straight off the top of our heads, those raw scenes, raw sentences, that came to us just once become the highlight. Those unplanned moments can be the most incredible part of a story. In that sense every story here, and every writer here, is in some way just like Prince. We all shine in the unrehearsed, unplanned moments in our art and in that I think Prince would be proud of all of us here who are wiling to bare ourselves in the written word.
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