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If Prince (the Musician) Was the Same as The Little Prince

What if the Prince, the musician, had been the main character in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's THE LITTLE PRINCE?

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Kristen Twardowski

Staff Writer

Kristen Twardowski stumbled her way through working with wolves and libraries and found her professional home doing marketing and data analysis in the publishing industry. Though there will always be a place in her heart for numbers and graphs, the rest of her love is given to words. She recently published her debut novel, a psychological thriller called When We Go Missing, and blogs about books and writing on her website A Writer's Workshop.

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Though Justin Timberlake’s tribute at the Super Bowl to late musician Prince was ill-advised, author Amber Sparks told a story on Twitter that almost made up for it. Apparently her young son confused Prince of Purple Rain fame with the Little Prince from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s book.

https://twitter.com/pennypyro/status/960281693193109504

(Now I’m near weeping too, Amber.)

Which made me wonder, what would The Little Prince have been like with Prince as the eponymous character? Here is how I think it would have gone:

  1. The little prince said, “When you’ve finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend your planet.” Purple Prince would have tended it while wearing…purple. Obviously.
  2. Prince wouldn’t have asked the narrator to draw a sheep, but he might have been on board with a drawing of a boa…as long as it was a feathered one.
  3. If Prince did ask someone to draw him a sheep, he would have been a perfectionist about it. If it takes 1,800 sheep iterations to create the perfect sheep, then you had better make 1,800 sheep iterations.
  4. When looking at Prince, people would agree that “In the face of an overpowering mystery, you don’t dare disobey.”
  5. For a little while, “no one had believed him on account of the way he dressed,” but people would have gotten over that very quickly.
  6. The world would still agree that if you spot Prince here again, you shouldn’t let us all go on being sad; instead, “send word immediately that he has come back…”