Shouts from a Third Act

Last week a friend sent me a link to an obituary. The deceased wasn’t a mutual acquaintance, but my friend Michael spent twelve years as an ordained minister and still reads obits regularly, saying they often tell him something new about human nature. Michael is also a Vietnam vet, retired CPA, and a writer with a sense of humor.

The first sentence of the obituary was on a par with zinger opening lines from great works of literature such as Plath’s The Bell Jar: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York,” or Orwell’s 1984, “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” The rest of the obit, quite frankly, was generic average-life stuff, but this first sentence rocked: “Faced with the prospect of voting for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, Mary Anne N____ of Richmond chose, instead, to pass into the eternal love of God on Sunday, May 15, 2016, at the age of 68.” Call me crazy, but it seemed deserving of a rap song.

My most recent blog was about the genius of the Broadway musical, Hamilton. Here, then, is my humble tribute to Lin-Manuel Miranda and the hip-hop art form. FYI, it’s based on the biographical facts in the obit, but ends with my own fictional twist. So, snap your fingers. Need a melody? Try something borrowed: how about Alexander Hamilton, the song.

How does a wife and grandma, God-loving nursing grad/Decide to end it–I do mean end it!/She passed away at sixty-eight, was November 4th too long to wait?

The ten-time grandmother was also a mother/A three-time mother with a sis and two brothers/Her sons found wives/They had good lives/By sixty-seven she’s sitting pretty, singing to the choir and giving high fives

Then a storm started gathering/Nobody saw it happening/Republicans have a dozen candidates, all in search of delegates/But only one has the funds to run, run, run/What’s your name, son?

Donald, Donald, Donald Trump/My name is Donald, Donald, Donald Trump/There’s a billion things I’ve done so far/But just you wait, just you wait. . .

Mary Anne is troubled: orange-hair, tanning-bed troubled/The Donald says whatever drops into that c’lebrity head of his/A celebrity never apprenticed to any form of governing but his

My name is Donald, Donald, Donald Trump/There’s a billion things I’ve said so far/and a billion more to take me far–ther.

Mary Anne, dejected, turns her gaze on the Clinton named Hillary/Not sure she likes what she sees/Okay her resume is in government/but her FLOTUS needs fine temperament/and Bill’s more a ladies’ man, not much a First Gentleman

The grandma from Richmond is beside herself/Thinking of offing herself/How can she vote, she knows she must vote or slit her throat or get on a boat/’cause Donald’s married to some foreign gal and Hillary seems stuck on her Billy Goat

Then one night it occurs to her/It must be the nurse in her/A third party is needed/If found, her death won’t go unheeded/She’ll will herself gone and instead of flowers/hubby will ask for donations/Lin-Manuel for President, he’s been uniting our nation!

If ever there was any doubt about the importance of Art, the Broadway musical Hamilton should have non-believers begging forgiveness. Forget for a moment the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the record-breaking 16 Tony nominations, and the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theatre Album. The people have spoken and not just some people. Young and old, whites and non-whites, historians and kids-bored-by-school, rich and poor, and–even more astonishing in this tumultuous Presidential Election year–Democrats and Republicans. President Obama joked that he and Dick Cheney finally have something in common.

It turns out what unites all these different people is their love for a musical with a whole lot of rapping going on. It’s not entirely rap or hip-hop. There’s also R&B, 60s British Pop, and the kind of soaring ballads that give traditional theatre-goers goose bumps. Is it any wonder that creator/star Lin-Manuel Miranda was named a MacArthur Fellow (aka the “Genius Award”) last September? How many people would choose a hefty biography as a beach read and envision it as a rap-musical fifty pages in? Or realize that poor, illegitimate, orphaned Alexander Hamilton, who was born in the Caribbean and set sail for New York for a brighter future, embodies the immigrant experience for many people of color–despite being a white man.

Hamilton started wowing Off-Broadway audiences on Day 1 in January 2015. A hit Off-Broadway doesn’t always translate to a hit on Broadway, where 3 out of 4 productions fail. Hamilton opened at the Richard Rogers Theatre last August, less than a year ago. Is it true the only way to buy a ticket right now is by mortgaging your house to a scalper or entering the digital lottery that awards a handful of $10 front row seats to the hundreds of hopefuls who apply every day? Is it true that many teachers across the country are using the cast album or videos of some of the performances to teach an important slice of U.S. history? Is it true that the musical’s success saved Alexander Hamilton from being knocked off the $10 bill? Yes! Yes! And Yes! (Instead of AH, Andrew Jackson will get knocked off the $20 bill and replaced with Harriet Tubman.)

There are many stories about Hamilton, and you’ve probably heard at least one. My favorite is one that’s been told by Ron Chernow, who wrote the much-praised Alexander Hamilton, on which the musical is based. Early on Lin-Manuel asked him to be a historical consultant on the project and showed up at his house one day in 2009 to try out a song: snapping his fingers, he rapped/sang the title song that would eventually open the show. Chernow, a gray-haired Pulitzer Prize-winning white historian didn’t know much about hip-hop, but he thought the song was the most astonishing thing he’d ever heard. Lin-Manuel had condensed the first 40 pages of his very long book into a 4-minute song. Fast forward a few years and L-M asks Chernow to drop by one of the first rehearsals. The historian sees eight black and Latino actors standing in front of a row of music stands. He was confused. Rather, he though L-M was confused. This was a story about the Founding Fathers–a bunch of white men. Within five minutes of listening to the performers, he was a believer. This is what he said in the New York Times in July 2015. “The miracle of the play is that it shows us who we were as a nation but also who we are now. This young, multiracial cast has a special feeling for the passion, urgency and idealism of the American Revolution.”

Now it’s time for me to confess I haven’t seen Hamilton. YET. While I wait for my loan to come through, I listen to the cast album for the umpteenth time and watch the YouTubes of L-M performing at the White House. My older son, 27, was recently in Little Rock, Arkansas, on business. He met up with a colleague from his NY office, who told him about grabbing a cab at the airport. The cab driver’s first question was: where are you from? The second was: have you seen Hamilton? (He had.) My son also told me L-M had done a rap song about Puerto Rico’s debt crisis that he performed on the John Oliver Show. He told me to check it out on YouTube, and I did. While I knew a little about the debt crisis, it was mostly sound bites. I learned a lot more from Lin-Manuel. Genius.