It's The End Of An Era...

On June 1 2008, the lights of the Nederlander Theatre will go dark, signifying the end of Jonathan Larson's RENT's twelve-year run. RENT currently holds the record for being the seventh longest-running Broadway show and has had a touring cast in over ten countries through the years. It is the first Broadway show I ever saw, and it spoke to me in a way that no single piece of art ever did prior or since. I have written about Jonathan Larson and what his words and his life mean to me in the past, albeit not so eloquently, as I was overcome with emotions at the time, and to be honest, I'm not sure I could do any better now.

When I logged onto the Official Website for the play and saw that countdown clock, I could hear the empty theater echoing in my mind, and a tear slipped down my cheek. I never wanted to return to New York once I left; it was no secret that I wasn’t happy there—not in the city, not in my childhood—and I wanted to run as far from those painful feelings as possible. Friends have often teased me throughout the years that with my luck, my kids will someday want to visit New York and will fall in love with it, and I’ll be faced with going back and forth to the city often, just to visit them. I always said that if the time came when my kids did want to see the city, I would be a dutiful mother and take them. We’d take the bus up to 57th Street, and I’d show them where my mother used to work, at the building with the big red 9 on the street that classmates of mine would argue, when we rode by on a school bus out on a field trip, was actually just a lowercase E—a building featured in Sex and the City and Friends, an iconic part of the city to me at least. We’d hit Bloomingdale’s and the new F.A.O. and get a package of those roasted nuts that always smell ten times better than they taste. We’d walk 5th Avenue and pop into Godiva and the Disney Store, and I’d point out where the Warner Brothers store used to be. Maybe we’d lunch at Serendipity (oh wait, that’s closed now, too) and dinner at Carmine’s before taking in a riveting (no many how many casts it had been through by then) performance of RENT. But now there is no way that can happen. I am nowhere near where I wanted to be in my life-- kids, like many other things, are still a distant, slightly unrealistic dream. All those years ago, RENT showed me what my true dreams were, and perhaps I took them for granted, like I took the show itself for granted, thinking it would always be there. I now understand why so many people were upset those few years ago when “Cats” closed. To me, RENT was much more than just a part of New York history, but being that piece of history is enough for it to be missed.