UNEMPLOYMENT OFFICER [to VANITY]: I see here that you’ve been charged with more than nine years of continuous unemployment, ever since your career highlight—Purple Rain, in 1984. 

VANITY: Want to hear something?

CLERK: Something funky?

VANITY: People say that was me in Purple Rain, but it wasn’t, no way, that was Apollonia. Or, as I call her, baloney-face. She looks like me, she talks like me, but she’s processed. She took everything I had, including my face and body, and delivered them up to Prince like waiters on wheels. I despise a cheat, don’t you?

After Pop Life kicks off with a stage reading of noted San Francisco writer Kevin Killian’s Poet’s Theater play, Life After Prince, written in 1993 and updated this year for this exhibition. The narrative, which will be enacted by cast of illustrious Bay Area-based artists and writers, wittily follows a string of female Prince protégés— including Vanity, Apollonia, Sheena Easton, Sinead O’Connor, Kim Basinger, and Wendy and Lisa— to the unemployment office and their lives after Prince.

An opening reception to follow from 6-8 p.m.