I’ve landed.
NYC continues to be my mistress. She’s heartless and only out for my money. She’s beautiful and alluring in a way I can’t explain. She is a phantom I think about often when I’m not around her, yet the reality is all too real.
I need to stay with strangers more often.
Convinced I should sacrifice comfort for money, I am staying in BedStuy (which I’m generously calling Williamsburg, when asked) with 1.5 gentlemen (one has never appeared at all) in their 20s (venture on 30s but again, being generous) in a disgusting apartment, on a mattress, on the floor.
The curses of age have apparently caught up with me somehow, as I am not only finding it more difficult to do a real handstand, but I awoke this morning feeling like I had had a heart attack. Turns out I just screwed up my back on this godforsaken mattress. Where the fuck did my youth go?
In any case, I can’t scoff at $50 per night accommodations, so I’ve made it work. And in the meantime, I’ve put my funds where they belong: the theater. 4 shows in 3 days, thankyouverymuch. Plus the obligatory stop in Sheepshead Bay for Bagel Boy; obviously.
I grabbed the last rush ticket to Something Rotten (fortunately, did not live up to the name) and saw Fun Home last night. Tonight, I said adieu to Hedwig, my lover, my soulmate. Taye Diggs forgot lines and caricaturized my lady, but I still felt the loss, the mourning of this beautiful and transcendent show.
The connection you feel to this oddball, the raw humanity she exudes.
The brilliant comedy and tragedy blended together, like the star-crossed halves she references through Plato.
The sadness that permeates her hard shell; her transference of her own pain onto the weak. The recovery, the healing in her relationship with Yitzhak.
The sheer beauty of Trask’s lyrics, the poetry he weaves wrapped in the creative and modern melodies.
There is nothing I don’t love about this show. It has nothing to do with transgendered people or GLBT rights. It has to do with the human condition, with the connected arteries of pain and love that make each of us faulted and real. It has to do with the art of being a person, because Hedwig lives in each of us.
And you’re shining like the brightest star
The transmission on the midnight radio.
And you’re spinning like a 45
Ballerina dancing to her rock n roll…
All the misfits, the losers…
The strange rock n rollers, and me…
Lift up your hands…
30 Before 30 