No Day But Today
I was a teenage Rent-head.
Rent was the soundtrack to four years high school; the CDs the Drama League kids furtively handed off; the most coveted sheet music for auditions. It defined us as a group; to an extent, it defined us as a generation: the first to grow up with AIDS as a matter-of-fact reality, the first with teen-age peers who were openly queer. It defined our dreams and futures: we, the next generation of East Village starving artists.
(Aside: I heard on the radio that it's become popular as a high school musical. I can't even imagine--I remember fighting to convince our administration that Little Shop of Horrors wasn't too extreme for school and censoring out words like "penis" from scenes for competitions. Chris Durang was the height of daring and outré.)
My friend Tina and I spent months teaching ourselves HTML and coding a clickable "La Vie Boheme," in which ever phrase, ever cultural reference was a link. An (Original! From the first national tour!) "No Day But Today" embossed dog tag has hung from the rear view mirrors of every car I've driven, including my current one. And while I haven't listened for the soundtrack in years, I can still sing through the whole thing from memory.
December twenty-fourth / nine P.M. / Eastern Standard Time / From here on in, I shoot without a script.
I'm writing this now, because tonight is the last night of Rent's twelve-year run on Broadway. It makes sense--it's a show that's very much a product of its time, and it needs a few more years to make the jump from "dated" to "timeless."
And so, for me, tonight ends an era. Passion fades into nostalgia. My (long-since ex) boyfriend and I haven't called each other up at 9 PM EST on Christmas Eve in almost a decade. But the meaning's still there, even if it's lost its immediacy--a million silly, small symbols that will always tweak a handful of our memories.
Candles gutter. Riots end. And there's no way in hell that Mark and Roger could afford to live in the East Village these days, even rent-free. This is, in fact, Calcutta.
Still, and always--
La Vie Boheme.