When I got the CD in the mail, I ripped right it open and popped it into the player in my car. I listened through it as I drove through the desert, and I tried to picture the stage composition and the dialogue I was missing, like I do every time I get my hands on a recording of a musical I'm unfamiliar with. I listened and I drove and I analyzed and the stories unfolded, and frankly, I was underwhelmed.
Then I got to track eighteen. And I listened again.
I cannot tell you why Tom Kitt, in writing a song explicitly for Idina Menzel, thought it would be good to have our girl repeatedly ascend to a B-flat on the word "out," but there it is. Idina is my hero and all, but she gets super nasally and belty in that realm, and she ain't doin nobody no favors wit her stiff ass tongue on that diphthong. It's a nice idea, Tom, and I know you've won Pulitzers and so on, but please. This is what workshops are for. This is why you got so much funding. You're not Stephen Sondheim and you're not Stephen Schwartz, so if you're gonna write a melody like this, then WORK IT OUT. Also, why does Idina not have friends and/or coaches telling her that what she does on that B-flat does not sound okay? And—I beg of you—just imagine the cringe-worthy community theater productions. Skinny average-voiced twenty-somethings everywhere will be singing through their sinuses about "You learn to live with MEEEOOOW" for decades to come, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
I wasn't necessarily listening to be a critical bitch (even though we all know I can do that pretty damn well). Straight up, the word "out" makes my speakers rattle and my eyes water. I'm not even sorry if I'm ruining this for people right now. I thought more of you, Adele Dazeem. (But you know I have your back anyway. NBD you're still the best.)
As I have now managed to listen to the song at least 174 times since receiving the album, obviously the dreaded "out" isn't stopping me. In fact, I hear it less and less each time. And I can't stop myself from listening to this song. I'm hearing the orchestration, the suspensions, the song's structure, the brilliant words, the smart pulse behind it all. I'm even hearing why Kitt made the compositional choices he did, and how it all fits cleverly with the lyrics. And I am trained to do these things.
I am trained to write like anyone, too. I can identify speech patterns without knowing I'm doing it; I can re-create the thought process of an elderly Eastern European man and make it into something "hip." I can write books for crazy women who live with their mothers, and I can sound just like the rich white men who hire me and yet would probably balk if they knew my race.
What I cannot do, what I am not trained to do, is truly write my feelings on this day. I can't understand them, let alone verbally dissect them and the millions of factors that got me here. And it's why I forgive Idina her B-flat and Tom Kitt for even making her go there. (So big of me, I know, but just wait, you'll get it. Or not. Whatever.)
Yesterday, I was supposed to get married. I was supposed to pledge myself to a man for the rest of my life yesterday in front of everyone I live for in the place I love most. There would've been vows we'd written ourselves, a dance with my father, cupcakes and cider donuts from Atkins Farm, and 90's R&B with the people who know me best. There would have been tealights shimmering next to local lavender on the tables and strawberry rose gelato for dessert. The money we spent on the bottles of house wine would have gone toward planting trees in New England.
We would have gotten married, and this morning I would have woken up next to a man who truly was my best friend, but was not the right partner for me. I would have looked at him and wondered what I'd done. And then we would have gone hand in hand to brunch anyway. I would have eaten tater tots and bacon, and dazedly looked across the room at my uncle, doing his best to enjoy the days despite the stage four lymphoma that is destroying him before our very eyes. Turandot would have played at some point, and I would have raised my mimosa to the seat where my grandmother should have been. And we'd go back upstairs, and we'd pack our things, and we'd go home. We'd go on an Italian honeymoon and have three children with their father's thighs and their mother's cynicism and both parents' musical capability. We would have been fine.
I made this decision because I knew it to be right. It was hard and it was selfish and I ripped a future away from both of us and none of these fantasies will come to be, and yet I still haven't gotten to the root of this grief. I don't suppose I will tonight, and I don't know if, for this particular transgression, I deserve to. Tonight, for leaving Paul, for destroying this life that could have been, I deserve to sit here in front of Netflix alone. I deserve to sit with this gallon of Blue Bell ice cream that I received as a "not getting married today" gift and self-medicate with my cat while my wedding dress sits untouched, too big now, in the closet in my office. (Let's not read too much into how this is starting to sound like an episode of 30 Rock.)
Instead of making the choice that would have given me the world, I made the choice that was in the interest of me finding—yeah, I'll say it—the stars and the moon. (You like what I did there, JRB fans?) I spent yesterday dancing with the coolest seven-year-old in town, eating the best pizza I've had yet in Vegas, and looking, dumbfounded, at the people I have found to care about me. I woke up this morning, hungover and raccoon-eyed and smelling like chlorine, crammed into some borrowed sweatpants belonging to a fifteen-year-old girl who is half my size. I looked around at my dear friend's daughter's bedroom that she so generously lent me for the night, and I looked carefully at her posters from shows and Star Trek pillowcases and the shower curtain rod I'd managed to pull off the wall trying to find toilet paper at 5 in the morning. And I thought, you learn to live without. Or you don't.
