Purple Prose

One of Bambina's favorite things to do is have me sing to her at bedtime, but always a song on the subject matter of her choosing. It's like a nightly musical version of improv; a kiddie "Who's Line Is It Anyway?" wherein I have to perform on a dime like I'm Wayne Brady. I have total fun doing it, because you haven't experienced real adrenaline mainlining until you have to think of and sing no fewer than 12 songs about "the moon" or "the sun" before lights-out. I end up laughing as hard as she does...until I completely forget who I'm singing to, get caught up in the competitive spirit, and start singing "Blister in the Sun" by the Violent Femmes (a song about a young boy masturbating, for the uninitiated among you). Whoops! Mama didn't mean "I stain my sheets!" She meant to sing, "I like purple beets!"

You see, Bambina LOVES the color purple. It's her favorite color. She loves Jeff Wiggle because he wears the purple shirt (NOT, morons who ask me, Is it because he's the Asian one?). She has a purple shirt that she attempts to wear all day, every day and then to bed as well, but for my entreaties that shirts must not be stinky and therefore must be removed and washed regularly. Purple is where it's at. Which is why I was recently tasked with singing multiple songs about purple as part of the evening improv challenge.

Well, with the Violent Femmes incident, and the startling lack of purple songs, you see the predicament I was in. My mind raced, it searched the recesses of my 70's and 80's music stores. There was that band Deep Purple, but did they have a purple song? Nope. Damn! What else? What else?!

Which is why Bambina's favorite song is now "Purple Rain" by Prince. Having already pulled out that 50's novelty tune about the purple people eater, and having already added the word "purple" to songs having no reference to said color whatsoever, I was left with nothing but The Artist Formerly Known As. You see, the difficulty rating is that they have to be songs she doesn't already know, because then she just shuts you down with, "No Mama, you singing it wrong." So no "Humpty Purple Sat on a Wall" or anything easy like that. So when she said, "One more!" during the Purple Challenge, I just started singing, "I only wanted to see you laughing in the purple rain! Purple rain! Purple raaaaaaiiiiin! Woo! Purple raiiiin! Purple raaiin! I don't wanna be your weekend lovah! I only want to be some kind of friend! yeah!..." I'm not proud; I'm just saying.

So it is now her anthem, at all of 2 and a half years old. When Prince played the Super Bowl half-time show, Bambina ran up to the TV and shouted, "He know Purple Rain! He sing Purple Rain!" She couldn't believe how cool it was that the guy on TV knew Mama's song. I couldn't believe that I was going to have to explain this to the other mommies someday soon, lest they think I regularly play The Artist for Bambina instead of Laurie Birkner.

My one consolation in all of this is that my kid now also knows how to do that faux hand-in-the-air concert ballad lighter-wave that anyone who's witnessed Bon Jovi in concert knows all too well (I've seen a million purple faces! And I've rocked them all! I'm a purple cowboy! On a purple horse I ride!...).