a brief remark on my theatre kid days

Very early into my junior year of high school, I asked my roommate how she felt about music. We were still in the honeymoon phase where we pretended to be tidier and quieter than we were. She shrugged and said it was fine. I told her there was an album coming out soon that I was excited to hear. I warned her that I would listen to it all the time for a while. Again, it was fine. I’m sure I said, “no. you don’t get it. Like, all. the. time.”

It was the Hamilton cast recording.

I remember the day NPR streamed it pre-release. I played Yorktown for friends and marveled at the Schuyler Sisters. Everyone seemed really into Wait for It, but I liked Room Where It Happens more.

I played that album a lot in my room. I played in in the kitchen when I did dishes. I forced everyone around me to listen to me talk ad nauseam about it. My senior year, a guy asked me to go to banquet with him by playing My Shot over the auditorium sound system. That junior-year roommate even learned Guns and Ships by the end of it all.

I was obsessed with that album.

I don’t listen to showtunes much anymore. My music taste has changed. They still feel familiar and homey and don’t get me wrong, I love them, but they’re not what I reach for in the car or when I’m cleaning.

Lots of things have changed since I was a junior in high school.

Back to Hamilton.

I started writing this blog post in a Starbucks in downtown Orlando, a few blocks away from the big theater. And then I had to leave, because I needed to get to to the stage door on time. I shadowed Hamilton that night. I sat with the stage manager while he called the show and toured the set and saw where they keep quills and pamphlets and guns. At the end of the night I walked out through the barriers, keeping my head down past fans who were not there to see me. It was one of the most surreal, most humbling events in my life. Just people doing their job, saying, “lights, go,” every so often, and grinning at actors as they came offstage.

I don’t think I would have believed you, when I was 16, if you had told me that was going to happen. I was a kid basically making up what I thought a stage manager should be and doing my best to be that while reading the Hamilton book after I finished my homework. I hadn’t heard of the school I would end up coming to, at that point. I’m not entirely sure that “studying theatre” was even on my radar. At least, not seriously. All I knew was that I wanted to be in the room where it happens, because Wicked and Hamilton and The Last Five Years and everything Stephen Sondheim ever wrote.

I’m there now, on a small scale.

I went back to my high school over break, almost two months ago now. It took people a few seconds I didn’t belong anymore, sometimes. I had coffee and tea and lunch and dinner with some of my favorite people in the world in rooms that feel almost sacred, some two years later. I got to tell those people how happy I am, how right this all feels, how much I’ve grown. How high school me would be giddy with delight if she knew where she’d be.

I’m writing this now in my living room, in an attempt to avoid reading a 25-page article about feminist themes in an English Restoration comedy (oh, the glamour of the theatre. it’s still class, kid), listening to an album that I probably would have hated in high school. I finished a hiring packet for one of my dream jobs today. I need to remember to load the dishwasher tonight and buy milk tomorrow. And I saw Hamilton twice in a week, once from the calling desk of the stage manager. I cried, sitting in the back row of the audience, the first time. The second time, I understood the language of the job. I know how to call a show. That’s all this was, except cooler, because it’s Hamilton. I cried, mostly of joy and incredulousness, on the drive home.

In a lot of ways, not much about me has changed since my junior year of high school. I still laugh when I get nervous, still say the word “cool” too much, still am over-excited about pretty much everything. I’m a little awkward but I try to make it work for me (in a cute way, that junior-year roommate assures me), a little bit too in my head. I still put too much milk in my coffee and my room looks clean, but is actually a mess.

I am still so humbled by my life, and the weird and wonderful way it happens. It is ridiculous in a way, how clear the grace and faithfulness is. How casual and how normal it all seems, but how wildly amazing it is all at the same time.

So hey, sixteen-year-old Sarah. You see Hamilton soon, in a way you can’t even imagine. It is one of the greatest things you’ve seen onstage. It is life giving and awe-inspiring and feels hopeful in a very particular way.

It’s hopeful in the sense that this is my real life. This is the way it is. Check back in with me in another four years or so. We’ll see where I am, how clean my room is, how inappropriately and unironically I’m using the word “lit,” and how incredible 2019 me finds it all. And my extension, 2015 me.

I am excited to be in theatre. I love it just as much as I did in high school, but in a different, more grown-up way now, and I cannot wait to keep being in the rooms where it happens and to be a small part of creating art. That definitely hasn’t changed, and I don’t anticipate that it will. So here’s to the rest of my life.

To close with a lyric from Hamilton, the harbinger of all of this, in the cheesiest possible way, which feels right: how lucky we are to be alive right now.