{"id":4512,"date":"2014-03-05T20:20:49","date_gmt":"2014-03-06T01:20:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=4512"},"modified":"2015-09-26T16:08:20","modified_gmt":"2015-09-26T20:08:20","slug":"catharsis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=4512","title":{"rendered":"Catharsis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Theme Songs Page<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Previous Theme Song<\/a>\u00a0| Next Theme Song<\/a><\/p>\n

Catharsis<\/h2>\n

\"Purple<\/a><\/p>\n

Purple Rain, by Prince & the Revolution (1984), encountered 1984<\/h3>\n

Buy it here<\/a> | See it here<\/a> | Lyrics here<\/a> | Sheet music here<\/a><\/p>\n

If you asked me to name the most perfect week of my life, I would answer without hesitation that it was the one that began on Saturday, September 29, 1984. On that date, I caught a pair of flights that took me from Baltimore to Lincoln, Nebraska. And Mary, the woman who had flown out of my life on Halloween of the previous year and quite properly left me to deal with all my issues on my own, was waiting for me at the gate, her yellow Capri parked outside, ready to drive me to her new home.<\/p>\n

Tight as a Spring<\/h3>\n

Even with the occasional flashes of ecstasy over being single again that came and went, it had been a hard eleven months since that Halloween, one hard thing after another, eleven months that had left me emotionally tight as the mainspring of an overwound watch.[1] \u00a0I’ve written about much of it in these pages, and I’ve left much of it unwritten.<\/p>\n

But on that Saturday, the hard part stopped for a while. We walked out to the airport parking lot, neither of us quite able to believe I’d made it. But I\u00a0had. And so it was possible for me to do something that would have seemed inconceivable eleven months earlier: sit down in a car in a strange state, and let a beautiful woman drive me to her home. Openly, with nothing to hide from anyone.<\/p>\n

From the parking lot, then, to Mary’s apartment complex. From the car downstairs to Mary\u2019s apartment upstairs. Then the door closed behind us, and, to paraphrase Michael Franks, I was hers and she was mine. And the week that followed that instant is largely a blur of good things.<\/p>\n

Wahoo to Denton<\/h3>\n

\"Wahoo\"<\/a>One thing I remember clearly is that I fell in love with Lincoln, a town that greatly (and only to its credit) reminded me of Ann Arbor, my hometown. Some events do stand out. There was a leisurely drive through truly rural Nebraska, including a visit to\u00a0towns named Wahoo and Prague (pronounced with a long a<\/em>). My face in the photo tells the story, not just how much I enjoyed Wahoo, but also the magic that whole week was working. We saw the movie Places in the Heart<\/i> at the Sheldon\u00a0Museum of Art\u00a0in Lincoln. We dined in and we dined out. We visited the Joslyn\u00a0Art Museum\u00a0and The Old\u00a0Market in Omaha. We played Trivial Pursuit with some of Mary\u2019s new friends. We attended the University of Nebraska\u2019s homecoming game. We dined at Parker\u2019s Steak House, then a legendary spot in Denton.[2]<\/p>\n

For a week, nothing intruded on the bliss. I’ve never experienced another whole blissful week, before or since. I’ve never had a week go so exactly according to plan. And a week like that does release you from cares and tensions.<\/p>\n

Of course we talked about what the future might hold. On our last night (over dinner at Parker\u2019s, in fact), we began an indirect discussion of our aspirations, which for both of us turned out to include parenthood (in my case parenthood again). No one used the \u201cm\u201d word exactly; no one had to. The unused word notwithstanding, negotiations over a joint future were beginning. Only<\/i> just beginning, since we lived and worked 1200 miles apart, we were each separated but not divorced, and I at least came with considerable baggage. There was no realistic way we could have done anything more than compare life objectives at that stage. And we didn\u2019t try. We knew better.<\/p>\n

Newfound Vulnerability, Newfound Power<\/h3>\n

On the third night, we went to see rocker Prince\u2019s fictionalized cinematic\u00a0self-portrait Purple Rain<\/i> (out since July, but still playing). It was the perfect movie for that moment in our lives. The Kid, Prince\u2019s character, is tormented by his past, which has left him wild, angry, and hurtful to those who care for him, and prone to self-sabotage. But at the end,\u00a0confronted with\u00a0the emotional corner into which he is painting himself, he stops painting. You can tell he has reached that moment when he agrees to sing a song that the women in his band, Wendy and Lisa, have written,[3] after he had been condescendingly and\u00a0unproductively brushing off their proffer of the number all through the movie.<\/p>\n

The song, of course, is Prince’s big over-the-top hit\u00a0Purple Rain<\/i>. What it means exactly\u00a0has been a topic of great debate,[4] but for my purposes both on that October night and now, the answer to that question (even assuming one true meaning exists) is not important. What matters is that, for the Kid, the song is a moment of both newfound vulnerability and newfound power, a fact immediately apparent to the audience on the screen, a crowd of hard-eyed youthful cognoscenti of the 1984 Minneapolis music scene. The spectators are first mesmerized and then energized.<\/p>\n

After pulling off this triumph, the Kid explodes off the stage, dashes down to his dressing room, where he paces up and down for a few moments, in awe of what he has done, and then, in a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards interwoven with the rousing songs he sings when he returns to the stage (I Would Die 4 U<\/i> and Baby I’m a Star<\/em>), he sets things right, or as right as he can, with his parents (the source of his angst), and with Apollonia (Apollonia Kotero), his girlfriend whom he has been abusing.<\/p>\n

I was tired when I saw that performance. But the cathartic quality of it spoke directly to me through any fatigue I felt. I could dare to recognize\u00a0then that I had been engineering my own catharsis. I had<\/i> gotten single, I was<\/i> doing good work in therapy, I was<\/i> getting this love business right for once. And so for that night\u00a0Purple Rain<\/i> was my anthem.<\/p>\n

A New Level<\/h3>\n

When I boarded the plane home the following Sunday, we knew we were still 1200 miles apart, and all the rest. We knew there still could be no exclusivity and no promises, that each of us was wide-open exposed to the risk that one or both of us might find someone else, that all sorts of other things could also drive us in different directions. But what with the overwhelming rightness of that week, and the oh-so-tentative negotiations, we, like Prince in the movie after his breakthrough, were playing at a new level. As\u00a0Mary said, it was the most adult relationship of our lives.<\/p>\n

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\n
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[1] Probably a 20th century metaphor that dates me, but I understand that wind-up watches are still available in low-end and very high-end models. Most of us just check our cellphones now, of course.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[2] It\u2019s funny how some things are so clear in memory and others, right next to them, fade. I know Mary still had work to go to at least some of the days in the following week, and yet I have no recall of being on my own.<\/p>\n

[3]\u00a0Wendy and Lisa, the characters, were portrayed by Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman, who were then real-life members of Prince’s band, the Revolution, and\u00a0are still musical partners, performing and songwriting for the screen, as of this writing (2014). In real life, however, Prince apparently wrote this<\/i> song.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[4] This much seems clear: the singer has apparently been misunderstood by the woman he\u2019s addressing, and apologizes, saying that he only wants to see her laughing in, bathing in, or underneath \u201cthe purple rain.\u201d Whatever the purple rain might be, it\u2019s a good thing, probably a wonderful one. And the singer\u2019s impulse in hoping to place her underneath it is fundamentally generous, whether or not (and here\u2019s where a lot of the debate lies) he also is trying to establish or reestablish a romantic relationship with her, presumably for his own gratification.<\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for cover art<\/p>\n

Theme Songs Page<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Previous Theme Song<\/a>\u00a0| Next Theme Song<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The cathartic quality of Purple Rain spoke directly to me. I could dare to recognize now that I had been engineering my own catharsis. And so for that night Purple Rain was my anthem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,968],"tags":[3842,22,5411,5419,1988,2115,5392,5399,5162,5410,5416,5397,5409,5414,5396,5418,5395,5404,5400,5394,5415,5393,5417,5405,5406,5398,5407,5408],"class_list":["post-4512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-closeup","category-theme-songs","tag-3842","tag-ann-arbor","tag-apollonia-kotero","tag-baby-im-a-star","tag-baltimore","tag-capri","tag-catharsis","tag-denton","tag-halloween","tag-i-would-die-4-u","tag-joslyn-art-museum","tag-lincoln","tag-lisa-coleman","tag-mikes-murder","tag-nebraska","tag-old-market-omaha","tag-omaha","tag-parkers-steak-house","tag-places-in-the-heart","tag-prince-the-revolution","tag-prince-rogers-nelson","tag-purple-rain","tag-sheldon-museum-of-art","tag-trivial-pursuit","tag-university-of-nebraska","tag-wahoo","tag-wendy-and-lisa","tag-wendy-melvoin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4512"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5563,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4512\/revisions\/5563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}