Does anyone else know who Jonathan Larson is ("was," I guess, since he's dead…but he lives on in what he created).  He wrote the musical "Rent."  He wrote it, tinkered and tuned it and created a masterpiece, then died of an aortic aneurysm just a week before the musical premiered.  Ironic in a lot of ways, because the musical talks of death…but more than that, it speaks of living and enjoying life in the face of death.  That's something I think about a lot, especially with my life history and all my baggage.  It's strange.  I've been obsessed with this musical for about eleven years, now.  But I've still never seen it on stage, I've only seen the film version that came out in 2004.  Four years before that, when I was in college, a girl who was an RA in the dorms with me over the summer heard me talking about the musical, and she mentioned that she had the soundtrack and she'd burn a copy for me if I wanted it.

I forgot about it, but a few weeks later, she gave me copies of disc one and two of the "Rent" soundtrack.  I listened to them…and listened to them again…and listened to them again…and found the lyrics online, and memorized my favorite parts, and laughed and cried.  There are still songs and moments on both CDs that make me laugh and cry, and probably always will.  And I'm thinking about it now because my finest experience with this play was when I was sixteen, living at home, and I saw the original Broadway cast members performing songs from the play on the Labor Day telethon that I watched every year. 

Fall always reminds me of the songs from this play and how much they mean to me.

Essentially, "Rent" follows several friends living in New York in the 90s.  Roger and Mark live together, Roger got AIDS from his last girlfriend, and he's a songwriter struggling to write one last meaningful song before he dies.  Mark recently broke up with his old girlfriend, and she's dating another woman now. Collins, another friend of Mark and Roger, is visiting and he meets and falls in love with a man named Angel, who also has AIDS.  Throughout the course of the play, we learn that Mark and Roger can't afford to pay their rent, and their landlord is a man named Benny who used to live with them when he was their friend, but now he's changed and grown greedy.  Things get even more complicated when Roger meets and falls in love with Mimi, a young girl with AIDS… The play follows a year in their lives, from one Christmas to the next.

I don't know if I've just made the play sound boring.  A lot of people think it's boring, or stupid.  They think the songs are devoid of depth and that they more closely resemble television commercial jingles than anything of substance.  My boss here at Cinema Crazed, Felix, is one of those people.  But I'm not one of the rabid fans known as "rentheads" who have 200 posters and photos and various memorabilia from the movie stashed in my room, those who rabidly defend the play at every given chance... I'm just an everyday person whose life has been touched by the play and the movie.  There is so much that happens throughout the course of RENT, and all the little stories are tied together and interwoven, and the plot slowly builds to a crescendo that makes me cry every time I listen to it.  And I don't want to give it away for those not as obsessed as I who don't know the story.  As I said before, it's strange. 

I don't know why this particular musical affects me the way it does…or maybe I do.  And because you're reading MY article, you're going to muse along with me as I look at some key points in the play that touch me (unless you stop reading and go iron your socks, in which case you won't muse with me at all).

The whole "How're we gonna pay rent?" opening song really touches me deep in my sarcastic, cynical heart, because I wondered the same thing a few years ago when I was facing the fear of being homeless again, and even now, wondering how I'm going to pay my bills and my rent every month still weighs heavily on my mind.  There's a line in the opening song that says "How Can You Connect In An Age / Where Strangers, Landlords, Lovers / Your Own Blood Cells Betray?"  That resonates with me too.  I don't want to connect with people for fear of being betrayed, so I definitely understand where that thought's coming from.  It seems that I can't even mention that I'm sick to my friends without starting a fight with them about how it's my fault that I'm sick and if I gargled with salt water, I would get better.  No, I'm not kidding.  I wish I were.  I'm reminded every day that my friends are human, and that human beings are selfish and they need to DO SOMETHING when they see another person in pain, so they give advice, even when it's stupid worthless unhelpful advice, so that they can feel justified in blaming other people for their pain.

It's not a conscious thing (I can hear them arguing with me as I type this) but it's the truth, that's what happens; we can't sit by and watch someone in pain without doing something about it, and when that person is still in pain after our help, we can't bear to see it, so we turn the pain around  and turn it into blame for that person so we don't have to feel guilty (which we didn't need to feel in the first place, since the pain was never our fault, and all we had to do was LISTEN to what the other person said, we never had to try and fix anything... that usually makes things worse).  It's a difficult position to be in. In the play, the character of Mark is the only healthy person surrounded by people who are living with AIDS, a disease that will eventually kill them as even their own blood cells betray them and cause their slow and painful deaths.  That must be a terrible position for Mark, because he has to watch his friends die and he feels powerless to do anything except document their lives with his camera so he can feel that their deaths won't be in vain and that there will be a chance for other people to witness the lives of his friends after they're gone.

Visit Page 2 of Longwinded 14: Space for RENT>>