(It must be a slow month for CJ)...

LATE START NOT PRINCE'S FAULT

According to restaurant Dakota owner Lowell Pickett, Prince cannot be blamed for the late start to a performance by Portuguese fado star Ana Moura.

Shucks. I so enjoy blaming Symbolina, who's almost never on time. But fair is fair.

Donna Rose and Sue Wiltgen, sisters who drove from Mankato to hear Moura, were not amused by the late start of the mid-February performance.

"I wondered why I didn't see anything in the newspaper about the LATE start," Rose wrote to me in an e-mail. "We in the audience, who waited for 50 minutes for the show to start, found out 'through the grapevine' that Prince bought out the mezzanine and didn't arrive for the 7 p.m. show until 7:45, so we all had to wait for him. I don't mind waiting 15 minutes or so, but 50 minutes is excessive, and especially so when it's because one person feels he doesn't have to arrive on time. Does the Dakota management do this often?" Rose wanted to know.

Pickett said, "I apologize to those ladies." The reason for the delay, he said, was so the jazz club and restaurant, where the food is exceptional, would not have staffers moving around during Moura's performance. The atmosphere for Moura has to be different from, say, New Orleans' raucous Malone Brothers, who were playing Sunday, Pickett said.

So while the scuttlebutt may have been that Moura was held for the arrival of Prince, the real reason was the enchanting environment the Dakota wanted to create for the singer of Portuguese-style blues.

"She is so quiet and absolutely intense," said Pickett, "we even taped one of our kitchen doors shut to keep the noise down. We were trying to control the environment to create a nicer show for her. It didn't have anything to do with Prince.

"Prince," he said, "was really nice and really cordial. ... He loves Ana Moura. He actually flew to Lisbon to play fado with her." Moura is Prince's type, if you get my drift.

Prince returned to the Dakota on Valentine's Day, so he was there "two nights that week," said Pickett. He said that he did not notice the woman who might have been with Prince during his visits.

On Feb. 28, NBC Nightly News did a piece on American Ballet Theater soloist Missy Copeland that did not mention Prince, who may have had more of a working relationship with Twitter's @mistyonpointe than some believed. Copeland, whose Twitter account doesn't suggest she was in Minnesota, talked about how ballet was her passion.

Neither Rose nor Wiltgen found humor in the way Moura's late arrival was explained. They said Pickett had joked that "Portugal was far away," and "that she had come so far and (that was the reason) it had taken so long," Wiltgen told me.

Pickett believes the remarks he made were a reference to an earlier booking of Moura that fell through due to the cost of travel.

BUT WE DO HAVE A PREDICTION ABOUT PRINCE ...

I had to tease National Enquirer astrologer Maria Shaw Lawson regarding her accurate prediction that the Kim Kardashian-Kris Humphries marriage would not be a long-term union. Didn't we all predict that? Seven days before Kardashian caught her 72-day NBA player/husband off-guard with her divorce filing, I was referring to Kris as Kim's "husband-of-the-moment."

Lawson returns to the Radisson in Minneapolis on March 30-31 to teach "Developing Your Own Psychic Abilities" - a session to help people learn "how to develop, trust and use their own intuition, and how to predict the next nine years of their life." She travels to Minnesota a couple of times a year because she finds people here very spiritual and less interested in knowing, "Is my husband cheating?" than seeking an understanding of their purpose on Earth.

In addition to seeing into the future for our soon-to-be-exes, I asked Lawson about other locals: Which one of our local sports heartthrobs needs to be worried about injuries? Is one of our members of Congress destined for the White House? In our Q&A, I posed a subject's name, and she offered a prediction.

Q: Prince

A: He is quite the character. Everything you see with him is not necessarily what you get. He's a Gemini; he has multiple personalities to begin with, but in addition he has Scorpio rising. That makes him sensual and kind of secretive. He has a secretive personal life. There are things we're never going to know about Prince until after he passes, years and years down the road. But he has an opportunity to reinvent himself; 2014-15 are going to be huge years. He's going to be pushed to do something bigger with his life, but the next two years could be kind of hard for him. He's going to have some hardships and maybe some scandals. He's also very psychic, a very spiritual person. You may not always see that on the outside. He doesn't trust too many people. He could actually be a little paranoid with his Scorpio ascendant. He's also good at manipulating things to his benefit. If he thinks things, he can manifest them, good and bad.