Dear, God …
No, I’m not just saying “Dear, God” to be saying it. I’m writing an open letter. So here goes.
Dear, God, at this point I’m just pissed off. If you are indeed real, are you the one running this universe? Are you the one aligning or misaligning the planets? Are you the one who let Merle Haggard and David Bowie both die earlier this year — on their birthdays, no less? And now Prince? PRINCE? At age 57?
Mark Milstein | Dreamstime.com
Prince
What in God’s name (Oops! Sorry!) were you thinking? Have you lost your mind? I know you have that giveth and taketh away thing going, but really? Prince at 57? I think you can do better. My best friend cried for two solid days about Prince. Are you happy you made her do that? This is one of those losses — like John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and John John Kennedy — that will make us all remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news. I, for one, was having my brain examined in a workshop with my coworkers. You don’t want to know the results. And learning that Prince had just died didn’t help matters at all.
Why don’t you take out someone whom we’d be better off without, like Ted Cruz? Take that idiot now, and give us back Prince. Hell, (Oops! Sorry again!), take Tom Cruise. Take him and all the rest of the Scientologists. We don’t need them.
Mark Milstein | Dreamstime.com
Prince
Oh, dear. I can hear my phone ringing and email pinging now. The last time I mentioned the Scientologists, just in passing, their public relations person at the celebrity center in Nashville contacted me. Apparently, someone in Collierville (Collierville!) turned me in. Who would have thought there were Scientologists in Collierville?
She was all unnerved because I made a crack about them and told me I should call her if I wanted to find out what Scientology was really all about. So I told her, “Look, I had to deal with you people for years when Isaac Hayes was still alive, and you people are freaks. Don’t try giving me the runaround, because I know you, and not one of you is able to explain this without lying through your teeth.”
I don’t think she was too thrilled. I wonder if that’s why I found a dead rat in my bedroom the other morning. No, that was a gift from my tomcat, who also knocked over my flat-screen television (I finally got one!) the other day and caused me to crack a rib trying to catch it before it hit the floor. So now I have a torn intercostal muscle in one side of my ribs and a cracked rib on the other side. AND I have a spider bite on my arm. I’m falling apart. I have high blood pressure, low blood sugar, tendinitis, sinusitis, carpal and ulnar tunnel in my wrists, arthritis, vertigo while driving, degenerative disc disease, horrible allergies, dry eye syndrome, acid reflux, anxiety disorder, and a cyst the size of a fig on my elbow. But at least I have a tomcat!
I also have a handwritten letter on my office wall from former United States ambassador to Germany, Philip D. Murphy, which opens with the salutation, “Dear TimCat.” I kid you not. It ends with the line, “You make me so proud to be an American!” Yes, he underlined it. Can you believe that? He wrote me the letter (by hand!) a few years ago after I took some Stax Music Academy students to Berlin to perform for him and a lot of other people, AND he cried after they performed. So there.
But back to my open letter to God about Prince. Why would you take such a sweet, handsome, fashionable, shy musical genius from us and let all of these terrorists and Republicans stick around to drive us nuts? Is this some kind of a bizarre test? Why not take Donald Trump? Good Lord (Oops! Sorry again!). You’re going to let someone with that hair stay alive and take Prince away from us? Have you even heard “When Doves Cry”? Well, the doves are sobbing their guts out now, so thanks for nothing.
Why not take Marie Osmond, the most frightening person ever to walk this insane planet? Oh, wait. You may have created this planet. Sorry. But if you did, you could still do better. Look at Houston. All flooded. Oh, sorry. There’s no flooding anymore; it’s “ponding.” When did flooding become “ponding”?
ARE YOU UP THERE? If you are, what are you doing? Deciding which genius musician to take out next? We not only want Prince back, but we also want Alex Chilton as well. We’ll give you Ted Cruz, Tom Cruise, Donald Trump, Marie Osmond, AND Taylor Swift if you’ll give us back Prince, Alex Chilton, Isaac Hayes, Maurice White, Bobby Blue Bland, David Bowie, and Merle Haggard. Sound like a deal?