SPENT.

I’m completely spent, out of words. I tried to figure out what to write about today, but came up emptyhanded. This is the only thing on my mind right now. As I said, the musical RENT closed on Broadway yesterday. I was here in LA but really went through it with them all, emotionally. I just love storytelling, it’s a way of sharing ideas about life with whomever chooses to listen. This musical came around when I first “officially” started studying storytelling as art and what it means to be an artist. This show is about love, and expression and selling out (and what does that mean exactly?), family and most importantly living every moment fully because absolutely nothing is promised. That’s one of many poignant things about Jonathan Larson dying the night before RENT’s first preview Off-Broadway. He wrote a show about the importance of being present, and then died before he ever saw the first public performance.

It’s hard to remember that before RENT, there wasn’t really a show that combined so many relevant issues to so many people all at once. And it did it in a popular musical style. It had rock music, artists, gay people, AIDS, death, suicide, the homeless, drug addiction, ideas about artistry/selling out yet more than anything manages to be about love and optimism. That sounds like life to me.

So yeah – I’m mourning the end of its era. I understand this is its time, and that makes me more reverential. I lit a candle yesterday, this show deserves it. It changed who I was – forever.

No. Day. But. Today.




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