Idina Menzel and Taye Diggs had a baby. His name is Walker Nathaniel Diggs, he was born on September 2, 2009, and the odds are he'll grow up to be absurdly good looking and talented.
The RENT OBC used to feel like family to me. They still do now, but in a different way. Looking at pictures of Idina and aye with their son, I felt a sudden, familiar and yet strange sense of intimacy. Idina and Taye used to be constantly in my life. Pictures of them, interviews, their voices, their presence. Now they feel like my cousins in England. I love them and have small reminders of them every so often--but no real connection at the present. Nothing concrete from recent times. And I miss them.
It must be weird for the OBC. Go on to do other work, live their lives, have a million diferent experiences, and yet people keep pestering them and connecting with them about something they did almost fourteen years ago. Some have children now (Adam, Idina and Taye, Daphne, and Gilles, to name a few) and are married; some, like Jesse and Idina, have had careers that separate in some ways from RENT. But most of them--Adam, Anthony, Wilson--are superglued to it. Their entire image is about something they did in their twenties. They're almost forty, most of them; a few are past that. When they're sixty, people will still be asking them about it.
In some ways, it's a sweet deal. Imagine your whole life being about the worst thing you ever did--if it's about one of the best things, you lucked out. But still, twenty years past the date and people are still scrounging for details--it must not always be fun. It must be so tiring sometimes. I don't know. I love them, because I feel like I know them and because they saved me when I was drifting, time and again. I love them, because their family expanded to include me. I love them, because their story and their words, along with RENT and all of its magic, make me who I am today. And I miss them. And I would feel ridiculous if I were them, if a play I did when I was twenty-six has a sixteen year old who I have never met loving me and "knowing" me. I would feel like a fool.
And at the same time, I have to believe that they understand what they did for us. For me. How RENT is a story that endures, and they were such a part of it that they endure along with it. If I can ever affect anyone the way Gwen Stewart or Fredi Walker or Aiko Nakasone or Byron Utley or Wilson Jermaine Heredia have affected me, I'll be satisfied in life. They mean something to me. I want to mean something to someone.
I love them. I thank them. And no matter how far away they are from me, or I from them, they will always be my family.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment