We finally got to see Hamilton. Yay! I think to myself as I read the Seattle Times article about how some fans were not able to get tickets to see it here. I could have waited until it came to Seattle, but then I might not have been able to get tickets.
The day of the show, I was jittery. We went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I got to see one of my favorite paintings, Van Gogh's Wheat Field with Cypresses. On a normal trip, that might have been the highlight. It is much more impressive in real life because the colors are so vibrant. I understood the nature of art when I saw this picture sixteen years ago when it came to St. Louis. The artist picks a topic. For a writer, words and sentences are colors and brush strokes.
We took the subway back to the hotel from the museum because Jack was running the marathon the next day and didn't want to tire his legs out after the three mile walk. I would have been happy to walk. As we got on the train around 4:00, I had a small panic. What if the train gets stuck in the tunnel and we are stuck here for five hours and I miss the show? What will happen to my mental health if I miss the show after waiting for a year? All through the week, I kept the tickets buried in a pocket in my backpack. Every time I got back to the hotel, I made sure they were there. I made Jack bring a second copy of the tickets to New York in case my copy got lost.
Those tickets were a symbol of so many things. Sometimes there are problems in life that can't be fixed, or not without struggle or tremendous effort. Our family was facing about three or four of those things last November. Hamilton was our balm. The tickets said I'm sorry, I love you and We have your back, kiddo, when words were alone were not sufficient or believed. Hamilton tickets were the grand gesture that said things that couldn't be said.
Why do I love to travel? I love to be transported to a new place to experience new foods, new sites, new sounds. Some people travel with their families and use the time to bond. Others travel alone and meet new people. We travel to be transformed, to be in inspired. The reason people love to read and see movies and plays is to be transported to a different time or place, inside of someone else's mind and story.
So it goes with Hamilton, and why not just me but thousands of others are willing to pay more for a ticket to see a show than the cost of the airfare to get to New York to see it. To be transported is why we bought the tickets almost a year ago and were willing to wait.
We went to dinner before the show, with plenty of time to spare. Restaurants in New York are pleasantly efficient without rushing. We stopped at the Hamilton gift shop before the show, but I didn't buy anything because I was in a hurry to get in line. Jack and the Boy jaywalked across the street to get to the Richard Rodgers theater. I feared getting arrested for jaywalking and missing the show. I didn't want to be like the little girl living on Venus in Ray Bradbury's short story "All Summer in a Day" who got locked in a closet during the only hour the sun shone on Venus in seven years. Would I have flipped? Yes. Yes, I would have.
We got to the line around 7:20. I asked the woman in line ahead of me if she had tickets to the show or if she was waiting in line for something else.
"I hope we have tickets," she said as her teenage daughters took selfies. "My husband has them. We better have tickets."
"I have the tickets," he said pulling them out and showing her.
"Why don't you make sure we are in the right place?" she asked her husband. This woman was more neurotic than I was.
He did as he was told. He came back moments later and said, "The doors open at 7:30." Everyone was happy to be there early. I was the most laid back and intense crowd I have ever been in. This family had come from Dallas to seem Hamilton. In the theater, we ran into other friends from Seattle.
The show started. The first few lines of music are jarring, and the words would be considered by most people in polite society to be offensive: "How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman..." The crowd cheered and cheered and cheered.
The only thing the crowd didn't do was cry at the right spots, myself included. One person behind me was sobbing, and thought to myself Newbie... There are at least four songs that had a devastating emotional impact on me the first time I heard the entire soundtrack in one sitting. I was sobbing during "Dear Theodosia," "Burn," "It's Quiet Uptown," and the finale.
When I got to the show, I had heard these songs dozens of times, so much so that I had nearly memorized all of the lyrics. I was slightly jealous of the newbie, hearing it fresh on Broadway, able to feel those emotions live and fresh while the actors were on stage. I wondered about the first performances for the original cast who likely had to listen to an entire audience crying their eyes out night after night.
And I wondered as I sat in the room where it happened. Isn't that what so much of us want, too, to be in the room where it happens?
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