by Mayte Garcia
In March, the other shoe dropped. There was a terrible fire at the Heliopolis Sheraton. The hotel was relatively new, but there were no alarms or sprinkler system. Tragically, Egyptian law didn’t require those at that time. Sixteen people had been killed and much of the place had been destroyed. They didn’t know when they’d be open for business again or if the Nubian Tent would ever be rebuilt.
I wasn’t upset about the money, though it would have tripled my income. It didn’t even cross my mind that if I’d been there, I might have been killed. All I could see was that the dream I’d worked so hard for had slipped through my fingers. It might be a year before I got another chance to dance in Egypt with an Egyptian band, and a year seemed like an eternity to my sixteen-year-old self. I was devastated and probably being too dramatic about it—that’s just the way I ammmm—but Daddy tried to put a positive spin on things.
“You’re safe. That’s all that matters,” he said. “We’ll make the best of it. We can all go camping together in Spain.”
This didn’t improve things, for my taste, but Daddy pushed the plan forward.
“Look, you’ve only got one year of high school left. Jan’s going to be living in the States. After I retire, who knows where we’ll be? This is probably the last family trip we’ll take together.”
His genuine sadness about that made us feel bad, so we sheepishly got on board. I really was glad for that time with Jan, and Mama and Daddy seemed to be in a good, loving place with their relationship. Neither of them was seeing anyone else, so their fighting was at a nice low tide. He was feeling sentimental and happy and insisted on paying for everything, which I appreciated. It made me feel like his little girl, protected and taken care of.
“There’s enough in the budget for one concert,” he said. We had our choice: Celia Cruz with Tito Puente, or Prince.
“Prince,” Jan said without hesitation. She’d seen him in Washington, DC, on the Lovesexy Tour a year earlier and was still in a fangirl haze about it.
I wasn’t in favor of the Prince plan, because we’d gone to see Michael Jackson with Kim Wilde during the Bad World Tour, and it was a horrible experience. People were screaming and passing out, and not because they were overwhelmed by the awesome music; they genuinely could not breathe and were afraid for their lives. We were so crammed together that my feet dangled above the ground at times. I had a sweater tied around my waist, and some creepy dude tried to take it off me. That put me over the edge. I punched Jan’s shoulder and yelled over the shrieking crowd, “I hate you right now!” It was amazing to see Michael Jackson live, and God bless and keep Michael Jackson’s music, but I did not want to repeat that scene.
“The Prince concert is going to be just as bad,” I said. “I vote for Celia and Tito.”
I offered to pay for one of the concerts, so I could skip Prince to hang out on the beach, but Daddy wasn’t letting me open my wallet for anything.
“Wait. The Prince tour is called Nude?” Mama raised her carefully drawn eyebrow as she read the Spanish newspaper. “Oh, we’re going to see Prince.”
That settled it.
three
The drive from Frankfurt to Barcelona takes about twelve hours, and along the way is some of the most beautiful scenery in Europe. I loved the fairy-tale mountains and forests of Germany. As we passed through the French Alps and on to the Riviera, we heard a mix of Arabic and Spanish music that lent to the atmosphere of class and happiness. When Dad was driving, we listened to Cat Stevens, who reminded us to bliss out and appreciate the beauty in life. Finally, the freeway came close to the sea. One minute you’re in France, and then—oh, you’re in Spain! Easy. You find yourself on the coast of the Balearic Sea, which is always coming up with new shades of blue. The air smells like spice and salt water. You pass through busy little cities and quaint old villages, each one built around an ancient cathedral. There are very few straight lines in Spain. Curves are everywhere from the winding roads to the architecture. In everything—the people, the food, the music—there’s passion.
Years later, there would be a time when my husband and I were in desperate need of a place to run away to, and with the entire world to choose from, we decided to take our broken selves to Spain. To that cool sea air and persistent passion. From our house on the coast near Marbella, we could look out at the Rock of Gibraltar and the distant shore of North Africa. I thought Spain would take us in and cradle us while we started over again. I kept returning to the memory of that happy journey with my family the summer of 1990.
Daddy was right. It was our last trip together. The experience was sweet and a bit humbling. We did a lot of sightseeing, taking in great music and fine art and so much history. We visited Gaudí churches, climbed up and down narrow stairways, and walked cobblestone streets that reminded me of Old San Juan.
Daddy had rented an RV from the military, and I wasn’t excited about it. I told him, “I have enough money to stay in a hotel.” He wasn’t having any of that.
“People in Spain know how to do this. They’re like professionals,” he told me, and it was true. At an RV park south of Barcelona, we were among a large group of campers who had ritzy setups with comfy furniture and electricity for stereos and television sets. They drank wine and played music around their campfires at night and walked to the impeccably clean shower house in designer sandals. Jan and I quickly made friends with the furnished tent people so we could hang out, play games, and listen to music in the evening after laying out on the beach all day.
As the day of the concert drew closer, I dragged my heels a bit, but Mama and Jan convinced me that the Prince concert would not be the near-death experience we’d endured at the Michael Jackson show. It was arena seating, not “carnival” (such an ironic name for it), so people would be separated in rows with plenty of oxygen instead of being crushed together like a herd of cattle. Jan and I were getting pretty tired of the camping experience by this time. With nothing better to do, we headed to the Estadi Olímpic de Montjuïc early on the day of the concert and ate a picnic lunch on a grassy hill outside before going in to get our tickets, which placed us somewhere high in the nosebleed seats. Jan immediately homed in on a barricaded area directly in front of the stage.
“Hey, look,” she said. “Let’s try to go to the front.”
I wasn’t sure that was allowed, so I was heading for my nosebleed seat where I could sit and sulk and eat a sandwich Daddy had packed for me, but Jan came running back and said, “If you come early, you get a wristband. It’s limited to only so many people, so it won’t be crowded. They promised. But we have to hurry.”
Mama and Daddy and I followed her to the barricade, and true to their word, security did close it off with a reasonable number of people inside. There was room to breathe, and we were literally front and center as the roadies did final sound checks for the opening acts. Three backup dancers came out to look over the gathering. I didn’t know it at the time, but later I’d become familiar with this routine; they were scouting girls for the after party. They eyed Jan. They eyed me. These dudes are skilled; it takes them about thirty seconds to spot a girl, determine her age, and decide whether to hand her an after-party pass. One of them started a conversation with Jan, and another started to approach me, but Daddy stepped in with a friendly smile.
“Hey,” he said, Mr. Rockefeller–style, noticing the guy’s army tattoos.
I don’t understand how military guys instantly bro down like they do, but within minutes, Daddy had bonded with his new best friends, talking about this division and that exercise or whatever. Jan and I exchanged glances. No party invitation for us. The guys who’d come out to hit on us were now calling us “little sis.”
We held our position in the front row as thirty thousand people poured into the stadium. The opening act was Ketama, a Spanish group that did funk-flamenco fusion with a twist of reggae, so right away, I was dancing. The lights were still up, and Daddy went to get us some sodas, because now we’d been standing there
for several hours. Lois Lane, a pop group consisting of two cute Dutch sisters who combined girl-group harmonies with a silky sort of Eurasian jazz, played after Ketama, and then the roadies reset the stage with a big swing unit, a giant heart, and a circular ramp. I didn’t know at the time that this was a minimal set for a star of Prince’s caliber, but that was the whole point, he later explained.
He laughed years later when I told him, “Mama heard it was called the Nude Tour, and she was like—‘we’re going!’”
“Noooo,” he said. “Nude means stripped down. No fireworks, no big spectacle. We’re just down with the music. Nude.”
Prince was all about The Reveal, that moment of abre los ojos—open your eyes—when the artist meets the people for the first time. During one tour, he was rolled out onto the stage in advance, tucked inside a roadie case, which he then burst out of and blew people’s minds. When word got out and ruined the surprise, he had to come up with something else with equal impact, and he always did. Another time, he had me dress up as him, so when I came out, people went wild thinking it was him until I whipped my clothes off, revealing a fuchsia bikini and combat boots. And then he came out for real and they went even wilder. It reminded me of Mama’s rule that you must never allow the audience to see you before your entrance. That moment is important and worth protecting.
That night in Barcelona, it began with a thick blanket of fog that covered the stage. The lights went down, and I felt a sea change in the buzzing energy that filled the stadium, as if thirty thousand souls took one deep breath all at the same time. With the rolling fog came a deep, resonating hum—the sound you’d feel in your bones if you were standing under a power main. It grew louder and deeper until I felt it sinking through my ribs into my heart. It rushed into a series of fast-cut fragments—“For You,” “Partyup,” “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Around the World in a Day,” and a few others that reminded you how many hits he’d had—then a bass line, and then a rhythm, and then he was there, and he was everything. He was wearing tight pants and a scoop-neck shirt that looked almost like a unitard. They had a huge fan below him, blowing his shoulder-length hair back.
A massive roar went up from the crowd.
“I’ve seen the future, and it will be…”
I hear those words now, twenty-five years older (and wiser), and I see myself standing in front of him. I revisit that moment in my mind’s eye, and I can only imagine the perspective from which he now sees it, a perspective beyond time. If his faith in scripture has been rewarded, “a thousand years are as a day,” and his soul knows everything. He sees the grand scheme, and in the context of a thousand lifetimes, he sees this moment when we first saw each other for the thousandth time.
I could have sworn then that he was looking at me, but a great performer is able to make every girl in the audience feel as though he’s looking at her, and knowing what I know now about the power exchange between the stage and the stadium, I know that his focus was entirely on the performance. It had to be, because what he did over the next hundred minutes was—there are no words—it was a marathon jumping into a tornado swallowed by wild horses. It’s impossible to adequately describe the power of Prince in concert if you haven’t experienced it: the exhilaration of funky beats, the skill of a symphony orchestra, the wings of a gospel choir, hard-driving dancers, hard-rocking musicians—and all the while, he danced in these high-heeled platform boots. This man was a beast as a singer, dancer, and musician. I feel bad for anyone who never got to experience it.
The highs had me jumping up and down with my hands in the air. The lows brought tears to my eyes. My mouth was wide-open, but I was too in awe to scream. And this is another thing I love about Europe: They love music and don’t care how ridiculous they look. They just go nuts, leaping and waving, which is what I was doing when suddenly, Prince stepped to the edge of the stage, leaned forward, and stuck his tongue out at me. (Later on, when I told him this, he just smiled his sweetly mischievous smile.)
Out of “The Future” came the iconic chords that blow the walls open for “1999”—which had the whole place screaming along. Then came the crazy lead beat for “Housequake.” He played a lot of the big songs, “Purple Rain,” of course, and “Take Me with You,” and stuff like that. Rosie Gaines started out as the New Power Generation’s keyboardist and later stepped in with vocals when Prince was ready for a change in sound, and that night, Rosie was a wonder. She came on and killed it during “Let’s Jam It” and “Nothing Compares 2 U.”
They brought the long set home with “When Doves Cry”—and I was crying, too. When the stadium chanted and screamed him back onstage for an encore, he did “Baby I’m a Star”—insane Latin rhythms and dance moves with spins and slides—which segued to “Brother with a Purpose” and “We Can Funk.” When he launched into “Thieves in the Temple,” I felt Daddy’s grip on my elbow.
“Mayte, do you hear that? It’s Arabic—this music—this is your music!”
“You should be dancing to that,” Mama shouted in my ear over the roar of the concert. “He needs to see you dance. Maybe he’d hire you for a music video or—”
“You guys,” I shouted back, “can we please not be talking about this right now? Just enjoy the show!”
I turned my back to them and continued going completely nuts like everyone else around us until the final bars of “Respect.” They brought the lights up, and people milled toward the exits in a haze. A feeling I couldn’t define—love, unity, happiness, contagious energy—bound us all together, made us smile at one another, yield the right of way at the gates, and wave as we drove out calling, “Buenas noches.” In the car on the way back to the campground, I was practically comatose.
I was completely in awe of this performer. What he’d done on that stage—that was all I could think about. And this wasn’t a romantic thing. I wasn’t smitten with him that way. Not yet. But I’d never experienced anything so electrifying. Everyone on the stage worked his or her heart out. Everything was perfect, but nothing came off as routine or overdone. The look of it was as finely tuned as the music. At the center of it all was this supernova of a performer who danced as hard as any of the dancers and played every instrument he could get his hands on during the hundred-minute set.
With our front-row view, I could see the straining neck muscles and wardrobe drenched in sweat. As a performer who knows how to give up everything on the floor, I knew how hard these people were working. But I could also feel how their energy fed off his. Driving down the dark highway on the way back to our campsite, I could feel that force pulling me. Not to be with him, but to be an artist. To perform with absolute commitment. To dance with absolute joy. Now I know this is what inspiration feels like. Back then, I only knew I had to feel it again.
On the way back to Wiesbaden, Mama formulated a plan, and she was sticking to it. “Mayte, that Middle Eastern music—you’re going to send him a tape of yourself dancing. You should be in one of his videos.”
Daddy agreed with her, but I had one foot back in reality.
“You guys are crazy,” I said. “We don’t have anyone’s information. We don’t even know where they’ll be a week from now.”
“I’ll get the info,” said Mama. “You make the tape.”
“You’re dreaming. It’s not going to happen.”
But when we arrived back in Wiesbaden, Mama did some checking and discovered that the Nude Tour was right behind us. We saw Prince in Barcelona on July 25. From there, the show was going to Marbella and La Coruna, then to Belgium and the Netherlands, and then they’d be in Germany, performing in Dortmund and then at Maimarkthalle, a huge concert and exhibition venue in Mannheim on August 8.
“We’re going,” said Mama. “We are going, and I don’t care what it takes, we are going to get that videotape to Prince.”
“What videotape? There is no tape.”
“You’re going to make one.”
“Mama, I’m not making a videotape. I have school starting soon. I have
bookings. I don’t have time or equipment to do it in a way that would be—It would have to be, you know, professional. Didn’t you see how perfect everything was? The lighting? The—the everything? And you have no way to get it to him. It’s a waste of time.”
“All it has to be is you dancing,” she said. “Just like that.”
She finally wore me down, and I said, “If I have time, I’ll cut together something I have. But just let me do it myself. Don’t be hovering and telling me what to put in or which show or—or anything.”
The night before the concert, alone in the living room, without overthinking or really thinking at all, I came up with a tape Daddy had made at a recent gig and did a rough cut with the VCR ghetto-rigged to the camera. Daddy was still in the habit of videotaping my performances so I could review them afterward and figure out ways to improve, so this wasn’t anything particularly high-tech, but it showed what I could do. I let it roll past the intro and hit Record on the camera right before my entrance. I let it roll through some turns and then pushed Pause, then fast-forwarded and hit Record again as I was whipping out the sword. I let it roll for a bit of me doing backbends and floorwork with the sword on my head and spinning the sword off, paused it again, grabbed a piece of a drum solo at the end, and then out. All together, it was less than three minutes.
“That’s too short,” said Mama when she watched it over my shoulder.
“I don’t want him to get bored,” I said.
I took the tape out of the camera and tucked it in its cardboard sleeve with my business card and a brief note. Something like: