I had so much laundry to fold last night (has a letter ever started with a sexier sentence?) and wanted a movie to do it with. I got a lot of good suggestions from twitter, but like the stranger you've been making eyes with all night across the room, I knew whom I'd end up with, and that movie was tick tick BOOM. I'm sorry, I refuse to write it out with the ellipses. Take that as a whiff of the resistance I come to this show with. I don't really like this show. I saw a production of it in college—maybe the last bit of college theatre I saw, now that I think about it? It was commencement weekend my senior year, I must've seen it a couple times because I turned out to know most of the songs almost by heart. I'm reading a book about writing nonfiction books which suggests putting your thesis in the introduction, so: I don't like the musical, I loved the movie, and my theatre refugee heart is having a hard time lately.
Of course, it started with Sondheim. The real Sondheim, sadly departed, not Bradley Whitford's completely wild and perfect imitation in ttB. Sondheim's death led me back to listening to his music, to thinking about his music's role in my life. The news came when I was home for Thanksgiving weekend, so my first touchstone was my mom's role in a community theatre production of A Little Night Music when I was a kid. I didn't see the show, but I knew her song was "The Miller's Son," and I must've heard her sing the first line, "I shall marry the miller's son," so I thought my mom was playing the ingenue, a sweet woman getting ready to be married. Then many years later I heard the whole song and realized, Oh! It's about being a slut!
And then more years later I learned the song myself, to sing it for auditions for a college production of Into the Woods. I didn't get cast (though I should've, I was down to the last two for Jack's Mother and this is the one bit of casting bitterness from decades ago that I still hold, I would've been better than the girl who was cast, sorry to her!) but I played in the pit. French horn... on a keyboard... because there wasn't a French horn player and I had the one-handed piano skills... for about 60% of the score. All the fanfares were cut. But listening to the cast album even now, I hear my parts rising up through the orchestrations. No more questions... HONK No more tests... HONK. It was a cheap keyboard and you couldn't modulate the volume with key pressure.
So you see, how this is flashing me back so intensely to almost twenty years ago, to when my whole life revolved around the stage and the spaces around it. When my always iffy voice was in the best shape of my life (I remember thinking once, Oh wow, I sound like my mother) except maybe for now since I sing daily, at least a lullaby every evening. I'm thinking, too, about friends I haven't talked to in years, but who I still see cropping up on social media—the actors who are now writers and directors, the actors who still act, the stage managers who now write for tv. It seems like a lot of people I went to college with now write for tv.
And movies and plays, too, which brings us to tick tick BOOM. Because my friend from college, whom I've lost touch with, who played the Baker in Into the Woods and I think TK in tick tick BOOM, he wrote the screenplay for this movie. And you know what, his screenplay is extremely good. And I miss him and I miss doing theatre, I miss art that had other people in it, art you could do a reading of in front of an audience (I know you can do that with prose but it's not the same), where maybe Stephen Sondheim would come and leave you a nice voicemail, and you could write that fact into your next musical. If that happened to me, I absolutely would. Turn your blurbs into art, yknow?
I've thought about college-me more this week than I have in years. Not the classrooms or writing but the hours I spent almost every night making theatre, sometimes acting, sometimes someone let me, but more often production managing or playing poorly in the pit, or designing props or posters or doing whatever anyone would let me. I carried that impulse out of theatre for a bit too long, too, meeting a cool new writer friend who was working on a project and saying, "Oh, I'd love to work on that, too!" And then realizing that wasn't how we made friends anymore, no longer the 17-year-old who stayed at strike scraping paint off the black box floor until 2am, after which someone asked her to stage manage a show—this is how we make friends, no? By volunteering for menial labor and helping out and becoming useful, and thus involved, and thus included? (It backfired plenty of times but I also met my two best friends working on a show, stage manager, production manager, and helpful set constructor still here after now literally twenty years.) You can't do that with writing, at least not the same way. Or maybe you can't do that when you're not in college anymore, you're an adult folding laundry, watching a movie about a 29-year-old singing about turning 30 in 1990 and how Sondheim wrote a Broadway show by 27, so at 29 he's running so late (not even knowing that he would die at 35, the night before his Broadway hit-to-be premiered), and that movie was adapted from the play by a friend you lost touch with when he moved to LA to write for a TV show. And you're folding laundry in the middle of Connecticut, and your book will come out when you're 41.
I'm not worried about my age, this all took as long as it needed to take, and it wasn't even that long. I just miss the life I left behind about 15 years ago, not even the acting, though I miss that, too, but I was in the audience of plenty of readings like the one Jonathan sweats over in tick tick BOOM. I wasn't a powerful producer but I helped a little bit, helping an off-Broadway theatre decide what to produce, helping writers make their plays better, chopping crudites and pouring wine for the after-reading mingle. Books have after-reading mingles, too, how much of this is missing people, not specifically theatre? No, it's definitely missing theatre, too. Missing being 23 and a mess. Missing being able to write all night looking for inspiration, but you can't when the baby wakes up at 6. I mean, I was never good at working overnight, but it would be nice to be able to have the option.
I'm not sure if I mentioned that I loved the movie, but I really did.
Thank you for reading! Please pardon any typos or sentences that fade out half-way, they're what let me send this out free and weekly. If you enjoyed this newsletter and want to share it, or were forwarded this edition and want to subscribe, the link is tinyletter.com/jaimealyse. You can also follow me on twitter here, and when my book is done and ready to be preordered this is where I will tell you about that.