Seasons of Love

It was the year 1998 in London, the year I graduated and also that summer when I fell in love with the musical Rent. The musical came to London after the success in New York and 4 of the original Broadway cast were in the London version. I was a big fan of the show which they call a renthead. Rentheads are fans who lined up in the theater 3-4 hours before the show starts to sit in the first 2 rows, which other benefit was the price of the ticket is cheap (around 15 pounds compared to more than 30 pounds for good seats). I loved Rent so much that I watched it twice and also played the soundtrack all over and over again for a year until I knew all the songs by heart.

When I saw the movie trailers that the movie is opening the day before Thanksgiving Day, I was ecstatic. So on Thanksgiving morning, I went to watch the movie. I was waiting in anticipation for the first chords of the piano playing Seasons of Love. The movie is a rehash of Puccini's opera La Boheme with AIDS as the disease instead of TB. It is also almost similar to the stage version but now we get to see everything magnified on the big screen and also avoid the saliva from the singers showering me (they really sing very passionately on stage and you can see the tiny shiny saliva droplets falling when you sit on the 2nd row). The 4 actors whom I saw on stage has aged a bit, which makes me thinking that I did aged too as well. I realized that 7 years did changed me. At that time, I wanted to be like them, a bohemian and going against the norm - rebellious, unconventional, controversial and all those bad stuffs. Now as I am older and more mature (ahem ahem), I am wondering - what was I thinking then? The movie still had its moments which made my eyes well up though, probably those are nostalgic tears or perhaps I'm crying because I'm older by 7 years.


Since this is the season of love, this is also the season of gaining weight. We went to our young adult pastor's house last night for Thanksgiving dinner and today we held a Thanksgiving party for my colleagues at our apartment. I do need to keep my cholesterol level in check because it is a bit high and I need to have another checkup in another 4 months. If I was 7 years younger, I do not need to worry about this now... sigh... :)