I am the youngest of my brothers and sisters, so maybe they shouldn’t read this part, or at least they shouldn’t take it to heart. But dang, with a knee surgery to be scheduled, and other pains and aches, I’ve been thinking more and more about aging. Looking at my father who is 91, I think, yeah, maybe I could do that, but I don’t know how much longer I could go if I’m struggling this much already.
I used to say that I wanted to live to a hundred and so I wouldn’t be middle aged until I reached 50. Well, I’m “middle aged” now and so I’ve set a new goal: I want to be here for the next round of Haley’s comet. I’d be 96 then. Come to think of it, there’s a song I could do about that, so I’ll save the rest of that story for later.
When I took my ex and our friends Robb and Joe to see the movie version of RENT in 2005, we were all up for a good movie. But when Joe and B realized that it was almost entirely sung (rather than having lots of spoken dialogue) they did not know how to take it. I know friends who in later years had similar experiences with Into the Woods. These were country boys.
These boys were into reality, not the world of Rogers and Hammerstein where people suddenly break into song and dance during a discussion of town rivalries. “What the hell was THAT?” Joe said as we left the theater and Robb and I couldn’t stop laughing. Let’s just say it was a cultural experience for them.
Opening in 1996, RENT was a musical on Broadway loosely based on a Puccini opera from the late 1800’s. I never had the pleasure of seeing it live on stage, but musical version deals a great deal with the AIDS crisis among artists and LGBT folks in Lower Manhattan’s East Village. I feel like there hasn’t been anything quite like it since.
Now, before you scroll away to something “less gay,” let me assure you that this song has broad appeal and its message is not limited or even specifically about being gay. It’s about how much time you have in your life, how many minutes in a year, and how you measure it. The suggestion, instead of money and whatever “success” is, that we measure it this way: “How about love?”
From the movie cast of 2005, including Jesse Lamont Martin, famously of Law & Order; Anthony Rapp, most recently on Start Trek Discovery; and Indina Menzel who later starred in both Wicked and Frozen, here is “Seasons of Love.”
Jeff's Song of the Day 