Chris Brown is a lawyer, an author of both fiction and nonfiction, and an adventurer into places the rest of the world might or might not go. You can find info on him and his work at christopherbrown.com. Once, on a New York City side street, he saw an apparition of Prince.

Theophany

“It was back when we could still party like it would someday really be 1999, I think, that I saw him in the flesh.  We were walking back from a screening at MoMA, trying to intuit a dérive back downtown. The streets were quiet, almost empty, bordering on noir.  Until we came upon a small mob blocking the road. People dressed for dangerous liaisons, ruffled up technicolor Edwardian vamp, restless and fidgety, pushing at the ropes that protected an idling limousine.  Just as we joined their space the double fire doors in the wall blew open, and suddenly there was this little fucking dude in an even wilder costume dancing on top of the roof of the limo, as if he had teleported there through some plush velvet Bamf.  PRINCE!  So tiny, literally elfin, like Legolas’s cool cousin from Minneapolis, the one with all the Rick James records.  Stomping some celebrity demigod dance on Cadillac steel, purple spaz-Pan charging off screaming crowd love to overflow and splashing it right back in big washes from whatever reactor core powered that amped up imp.  Then he looked up at the sky and let out this banshee shriek, a howl of pleasure and signifying honk, like an invocation to Dionysus in drag.  And just as fast, he was in the car and gone.

This manifestation of the avatar didn’t even last a minute, but it left a portal open for all of us there to find our own way through.”

This post originally appeared at http://whatthezeitgeistwants.tumblr.com/post/143222555297/theophany-it-was-back-when-we-could-still-party.