it must be bunnies

It's been an odd couple of months and this post will be a little odd, likewise. Humor me. As the busy-ness of my day job settles down, following the academic year as it does, I finally have a little bit of mental wiggle room to reflect back and plan forward. Let's start with the former and I'll get to the latter over the next week or so. Because I've been doing a lot of planning for summer projects and goals over the past few days, but I need another day or two to flesh things out a bit more, as they say.

A month or so ago, right before Prince died, I was thinking again about David Bowie. His song 'Fame' came on the radio one day while I was in the car, and that song always reminds me of Pretty Woman. And I just thought, how silly it is that all of these people I admire, from relatives to friends to artists and musicians, have these profound memories of Bowie, about how they owned a certain album - on vinyl, no less! - or how Bowie inspired them to be whoever they wanted to be, however unique that vision might be, male, female, whatever... And, me, I thought back to a movie that I watched multiple times as a budding teenager.



Then when Prince died I was struck with an almost identical memory, flashing back to the bathtub scene in that same movie, where Julia Roberts' character is singing along to Prince's 'Kiss', with Richard Gere's character secretly watching her, unbeknownst to her and her earbuds. "Don't you just love Prince?"

I do. Not that the two deaths need comparison, and I was incredibly shocked and saddened by the loss of David Bowie, but Prince's death, as far as celebrity deaths go, affected me a little more. I have so many memories of his music and the movie 'Purple Rain', all of which extend way beyond Roberts' brief bathtub rendition of a couple of lines from one popular song.

For some reason that I think has to do with my recent interest in serendipity and stuff, I found comfort in the fact that artist Amanda Parer's giant, inflatable rabbits (technically titled 'Intrude' which is appropriate if you didn't dig their presence then and there as much as I did) were witness to San Francisco's tribute, with City Hall donning purple lights for one night after Prince died. We had just taken the family to see the rabbits the weekend before and they were deflated a few days after the Prince tribute.

Because who's not cheered up by the sight of giant, inflatable bunnies, you know? (Well, everyone except Anya, I suppose. I can almost always work in a Buffy reference, after all...)