Tick… tick…
I’m writing this from my parents’ house. I took the day off from work today so I could watch my parents’ new puppy. They just got her yesterday, and she’s small and cute, but it just makes me miss our old dog more. Hey, what are you doing eating there? That’s where my dog used to eat! That’s where my dog used to sleep! Oh, well.
I’ll tell you why my parents needed someone to puppysit for them.
My parents have these friends, a 48-year-old couple from New Jersey who lived in Tokyo at the same time we did. Their 25th anniversary is at the end of the month, and to celebrate, they decided to go on a two-week safari in Tanzania. They left for Tanzania last Tuesday. On Friday night they were staying at a hotel in a remote area of the country. In the middle of the night, the husband got up to use the bathroom, collapsed on the bathroom floor, and called out to his wife. She called the front desk and they sent two people up immediately, who carried him to the bed. A few minutes later, he died. Just like that. The autopsy showed that it was a heart attack. He was forty-eight years old, with an active lifestyle, and no history of heart trouble. Out of the frickin’ blue.
So a couple of days later, more than a week before they were to return together, the wife had to fly back to New Jersey alone. The body had to stay in Tanzania for a little longer because they needed to get international clearance in order to release it. And today was the funeral. A couple of weeks before their 25th anniversary, she and her two daughters watched her husband being buried in the ground.
It’s absurd, it’s insane, it’s crazy. It’s life. My mom was on the phone with my aunt — whose husband died of cancer four years ago — and told her what a nice guy this man was, how active he was, how much he loved his family and friends and how much he was loved in return. And my aunt responded, “And you know what? That doesn’t buy you anything.” She’s right. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how nice you are, how good you are. It doesn’t matter what goals you have, or even if you have any at all. It just doesn’t matter.
Last night Mike and I saw tick, tick… BOOM!, which Jonathan Larson was writing at the same time he was working on Rent, back in the early nineties. Larson, you might know, died of a sudden aortic aneurysm less than three weeks before Rent premiered — and just ten days before his 36th birthday.
Tick, tick… BOOM! was originally written by Larson as an autobiographial one-man musical, but it’s been reworked into a three-actor show, with two men and a woman. It takes place in 1990 on the eve of Larson’s 30th birthday. He’s all young and idealistic and ambitious — he wants to be a hit Broadway composer. But he’s neurotic and stressed and worried because he’s about to turn 30 and he’s afraid he’s running out of time. Tick… tick… time is passing, time is passing. He constantly dreads the arrival of the BOOM, which he always fears is just around the corner.
The Jane Street Theater is very small, with a tiny stage, but it’s the perfect venue for a three-actor show. The lead role — Jonathan — was played by an understudy. I wouldn’t have known, though — he was filled with warmth and heart, with an endearing personality. In fact, he kept reminding me of Scott Bakula, because he looked and sounded and even acted just like him. The other two actors, who each played a number of roles, were great as well — particularly Amy Spanger, who sings a rock-on, balls-out (as it were) number towards the end of the show.
It was hard not to make comparisons to Rent in my mind. The music was in the same style — rock-and-rollish with quirky lyrics. As in Rent, the band was onstage, although this one had only four pieces: bass, guitar, drums, keyboard. At times they drowned out the lyrics, but perhaps that was because the band was so close to where we were sitting — we were on bar stools in the balcony, on the side, directly above the stage. (Not bad for twenty bucks.) The sets were minimal, but clever and economical — a small table opened up to become the front seats of a BMW and back again, and a rolling stairway became a rooftop. It worked.
Mike has reviewed the show as well.
I think I might see it again. It resonated with me, particular the portrayal of Larson. Ever since I turned 27 I’ve felt 30 looming closer and closer. I know it’s an artificial number — you don’t have to tell me that — but it feels like a big one. In fact, I feel like I might as well be 30 already. I keep forgetting that I have two and a half years to go, because like Jonathan Larson, I think about what I haven’t done. And how can you envision your future when it contains the unknown?
Who knows what can happen in that time? In 1997, the New Yorker ran a front cover that showed a long, meandering, squiggly line going off into the distance, travelling from 1997, to 1998, to 1999, and ending at 2000. Ultimately, not much wound up happening before we hit the big 2K, right? Just a presidential impeachment, a war in Kosovo, the return of Hong Kong to China, and so on. Plus I came out to the world and had boyfriends and real gay sex for the first time and graduated from law school and worked as a writer and editor for an online magazine. Not much, right? Heheheh.
Okay, so I guess there’s a lot that can happen to me between now and 30. Two and a half years. But it’s coming up sooner than I think, and I want to make the most of the rest of my twenties. When I reach 30, I don’t necessarily want to have accomplished a great deal artistically, although that would be nice. But I want to be able to say that I’ve lived as fully as I could have.
Yeah, it’s just a number. But I mean, why not pick an artificial number? After all, you never know when your number is up. It could come at any time.
Tick… tick… tick… tick…
