Rent turned thirty this year. So did my “second life,” so to speak, and to top off both, my actual birthday rolled around this past week. All of it together gave me much cause for reflection.
The musical opened on Broadway a few months before I graduated from divinity school. The day after I graduated, I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and given a one-in-ten odds of making it to the following June.
Rent was said to be the Hair of the 1990s. The disillusioned Gen X scene set to rock/pop music for the MTV crowd, broke twenty-somethings in New York’s East Village up against gentrification, and AIDS taking friends one at a time. I am a late Boomer or an early Xer (depending on whose chart you consult), and even though the slacker part of the musical didn’t fit me, the dying part, at that time in my life, did.
I had my master’s degree in hand, a Navy commission, and my whole life ahead of me. By the end of June, the commission was revoked, and while many people my age camped outside of the Nederlander for tickets, I started chemo. (I caught up a year later when the tour came to Boston and lined up for hours for the cheap front-row seats. We sat so close we could see every performer’s neck veins pop during the showstoppers.)
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I knew every number by heart, but the whole musical came down to one song for me. Toward the middle of Act One, the support group, a round, each voice coming in under the last and wrapping around the one before it, layer upon layer, until the harmony has its arms around everybody, singers and listeners alike, asking whether dignity will hold and whether anyone will care. “Will I?“
Will I lose my dignity
Will someone care
Will I wake tomorrow
From this nightmare?
It pulled my heart strings every time. Most of us get around to that question sooner or later, in a waiting room or a lawyer’s office or a quiet kitchen after everyone else has gone to bed. The worst part is asking it alone.
My other favorite was the big party number, “La Vie Bohème,” the whole loud table toasting everything and everybody, and I longed for that life the way everyone in their twenties longs for it.
Longing and living are two different things, though. I was a seminarian with a commission in the pipeline, which is about as bohemian as a church potluck. I had been in school my entire life, with a small circle and no real o’hana, and I lay awake wondering what my life and my death would have added up to had the other nine chances prevailed. Not a lot, it seemed. A couple of sermons nobody remembered and a box of books and Playbills.
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Fast forward thirty years. The anniversary benefit concert was about ten days ago, at the end of October, and a few younger (Millennial) friends got going about Rent in a group chat this week (87 messages by morning!), which is the only reason I dug out the recording for the first time since 1996 and played it in pieces across my drives that day. Hard and healing…
The questions have some answers now. The Navy that revoked my commission took me back and has had me ever since, from Arlington National Cemetery and two aircraft carriers to Guantanamo Bay, Kaneohe Bay, and now Naples. My beloved spouse has endured being sung to in public for a great many birthdays, my two youngest boys have recently discovered how to use the laundry basket, and there have been various pet companions and even more places we called home.
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For my birthday this year I asked for a clean garage, a facial, the car detailed, and my older son being kind to his younger brother for the remainder of the year. (Hoping the 21 days it supposedly takes to form a habit will take hold.) In my late twenties, I wanted my life to mean something. In my late fifties, it has. Next year is the big round birthday, and I am already planning it as a string of small trips with my nearest and dearest spread across the year, one or two of them at a time, because a year can hold a great deal.
The song most everybody knows from Rent asks how to measure a year in the life? Count in love and count today, because today is the only day any of us is ever issued. When I first heard that thirty years ago, it sounded like a dare. This week it reads like a to-do list. Love the facial, the detailed car, the boys’ clothes in the hamper, the travel plans with family and friends, my spouse of course, and my Millennial pals who kept me up past midnight over a musical.
Most of us have a soundtrack from the year our life split in two, and sooner or later it comes back around to ask how we are doing. “Will I?” never does answer its own question, and here I am being asked it again. And here I am answering with every inch and mile, laughter and strife…
The garage, by the way, is clean.
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