Purple Moon Boots

My friend Stuart was Prince & the NPG’s keyboard tech in the early ‘90s, and one January night when I was home visiting my parents I drove over to Paisley Park to pay Stu a visit while he did some busy work in the equipment room. I was wearing those big puffy “moon boots,” as it had snowed quite a bit.

By 2 a.m. or so, Stu had finished his tech tasks and we’d been chatting for a long while, so we called it a night, got our winter jackets on and left the room to head back through the complex towards the front exit. The equipment room had been brightly lit, but the long “party room” we needed to walk through to get to the front lobby was pretty dark and dim, illuminated only by some purplish mood lighting. Strangely, there was a DJ dude with turntables in the corner, playing slow jams to a seemingly empty room.

Stuart walked on ahead of me as my eyes tried to adjust to the dimly lit space, and as I got about midway across the room I suddenly walked right into the back of a piece of furniture, waist-high, and fell over the left side of it onto the carpeted floor, moon boots clumsily flailing up in the air.

I quickly got up and saw that I had stumbled into a retro-mod sofa with the silhouettes of a man and woman in partial romantic embrace on it….Two bodyguard-looking guys in fancy suits came running up, but the smallish man silhouette waved them off, glanced at me and asked in a calm, low voice, “Walk much?”

Nick Skrowaczewski
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