Published December 3, 2020 on WordPress and written by me, Rachel Beth Ahrens, continued from previous post. All Rights Reserved, 2021 Lady in the Blue Box Publishing, Reader Discretion Advised, RAYOR.
Ok, now you’re wondering why I’m pushing this final post quicker than expected. I’m basically writing this from the seat of my pants, excuse the expression, I know that’s a reference to Angelica in the “Schuyler Sisters” song on my iPod, just before my iPod went straight into my favorite song “Helpless” (still at 19 plays??? We gotta work on that).
Blame Twitter. But mostly blame Spotify. But Twitter also.
People started making random music artists trending topics on Twitter in a very viral way, by kicking off Wednesday morning at midnight to be #SpotifyWrapped day, for a lack of a better term. Taylor Swift was one of the top choices (BLECH! Make me choke! GRRR!), but soon enough, Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Hamilton Broadway Cast Recording quickly replaced it in a fraction of seconds, or maybe a few minutes. It was as if I blinked on Twitter, going to a different page, and there was #Hamilton quickly replacing the evil pop music hooker Taylor Swift.
Damn, nice job, maestro. Applause, applause.
Now, let’s get back to writing about the book G’morning, G’night, particularly the review I did of his Audible recording for the Kindle Fire.
PUSH REWIND.
Past midnight in the hours between November 30 and December 1st, the very last day of NaNoWriMo, I finally finished the audio Miranda recorded for Penguin Random House and Audible to be available for download and streaming from the Audible.com service.
Though I couldn’t believe it, though I think I can…
G’morning, G’night! is a MASTERPIECE OF SELF CARE.
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s voice is the most velvety and soothing voice for singing, as well as speaking as a calming way to wind down and start caring for yourself-
And above all-
This book at the end broke my heart, so much that I almost started crying when he read the last page and went to the end credits in the last minute.
It was almost like the tweet he mentioned on Late Show about the passing of Anthony Bourdain in this video:
But it was actually the very last two minutes of the book, the last few pages with the final few tweets, especially the very last page, included with it Jonny Sun’s drawing of flowers inside an ink bottle. In fact, it was more of the few tweets that led up to the big finish for a full breakdown.
The first tweet before the end said:
“Gmorning. Pain, joy, frustration, euphoria, everything. It all passes. It all keeps moving. Wherever you are is temporary. Let’s go!”
“Gnight. Rage, bliss, fatigue, rapture, everything. It all passes. It all keeps moving. Where you are is fleeting. Andiamo.” (I believe the last word of that is… Italian? Doesn’t sound like Spanish to me…)
And here is the last page, p. 200-201:
“Gmorning. Tired, but grateful. Sick, but grateful. It’s grey out, but I’m grateful. So much easier to start with grateful.”
“Gnight. Tired, but grateful. Sick, but grateful. It’s dark out, but I’m grateful. So much easier to end with grateful.”
Here’s my takeaway of those words-
Every year or so, Miranda tends to get sick in New York when he’s supposed to be performing. During his Hamilton run, according to the Graham Norton Show in England, he missed his “shot” of meeting his rap music superhero Jay-Z, the rapper who inspired Christopher Jackson’s performance as George Washington, and his hip hop superstar wife Beyonce (of course)- because Miranda was in the hospital, SICK with a 104 degree fever and about ready to pull out his intravenous solution out of his arm to perform, until his wife Vanessa pushed him away from it and said, “Honey, you’re SICK, stay. In. Bed!”
If you saw the previous ASMR post where Miranda is sick in bed in an episode of “Sad Sad Conversation” in 2011, while he was actually writing said Hamilton musical, he looked incredibly tormented and bedridden by illness. When he gets sick, he takes it hard, and he feels as bad as Alexander Hamilton himself in his final hours, the last moments he has with Eliza and Angelica Schuyler before dying from his gunshot wound to the abdomen.
And if you remember the “Introduction” part of Gmorning, Gnight!, it reads in rhyming stanzas: “The greetings are sometimes flirtatious, or cheeky, or weirdly specific, They’re pulled from my life or my brain or my thoughts, Terrific’ly Twitter prolific.
“-I don’t have a book of quotations
Or wisdom I pull from the shelf;
Most often the greetings I wish you
are the greetings I wish for myself.”
“So if I write “relax,” then I’m nervous,
or if I write, “cheer up,” then I’m blue.
I’m writing what I wish somebody would say,
Then switching the pronoun to YOU.”
I’ve gone back and forth through the physical book and the audio as well, over, and over, and over, combing it with a fine toothed comb. This time in the final page, he did NOT switch the pronoun. He’s using the ‘I’ and not ‘you’. He’s telling himself to be grateful for what he has, even though he’s exhausted, he’s sick and bedridden, and it looks ugly outside. (Yes, darling, I understand when New York weather can be disgusting. Wait until you get to Baltimore. Baltimore weather is UG-LY. And when I’m sick, it’s much worse. The migraine situation for me is unbearable, which is why I have a GOOD dentist, and an extremely good TMJ specialist/ dental surgeon, who also has a cool Jamaican accent like your favorite Disney crab.)
And honestly, to add to that parenthesis side note, when the sky is gray and icky, making everything around you look dead and like everything is sulking in misery, that is prime weather for me to get a massive TMJ-disease-induced migraine, or severe tension headache due to severe nocturnal bruxism, the dentist’s term. Trust me, the clenching I do to my teeth while I sleep (it’s involuntary, I never do this when I’m awake), I can live with it up to a point. But the headaches, face pain, and the stiff jaw all at the same time are MURDER.
So whenever Miranda wrote the words, “Relax those shoulders,” I felt like, yeah, how did he know I have the worst tension in my shoulders, that my shoulders ALWAYS hurt the most when I have a headache? And when he wrote, “Take care of yourself,” especially in the matters of 2020 and COVID19, I wanted to ask, how is that so easy to do when you can never be sure and you can never be too careful?
And the worst one, was: “But I’m grateful, better to start/end with grateful.” All because I have THE hardest time being grateful for the things I have, especially when I’m miserable and hopeless. And trust me, I’ve been hopeless and miserable ALL YEAR LONG.
How can I be grateful for a roof over my head when my parents’ rent is TWICE the cost of what we used to pay for our mortgage on my house that I lost in a matter of moments in January 2020? How can I be grateful when I have no money to pay for my medical needs now before the New Year? And I will never qualify for SSI, not even SSDI? How can I be grateful for this apartment when my parents could get so angry with me that they will try to kick me out of the house any day, just because my father threatens to hurt me one more time? How can I be grateful when my boyfriend, love of my life, and the only person I can trust, is an hour away and knowing he and his mother could sell their house and end up living on the street because nobody will give them a new home? How can I be grateful knowing that I could end up being homeless again at any moment and I have no place to go for someone I can trust, and nobody to love and love me in return???
I’ll bet that was what Lin was thinking as well. Because he started writing these G’morning and G’night tweets LONG before he went on stage and performed as Usnavi in his own show In the Heights. Practically since he got his hands on Twitter for the first time in his life. Practically since the birth of the smartphone in 2007, and he was still poor and buying super cheap coffees from the next door bodega where he could speak Spanish to the man selling newspapers and candy at the counter. And he still does, to this day, because Lin and his family still live in Washington Heights, Manhattan, which is a primary Hispanic-Latino community of people coming from Mexico, South America, Puerto Rico, and Dominican Republic.
And he started reading the biography of Alexander Hamilton while on vacation IN Dominican Republic, where he met his cute puppy Tobi the stray mutt furry baby princess. Even more, while he was in the Dominican Republic one year, he was paying his respects for someone in his wife’s family- Vanessa’s aunt, I believe- who passed away that year, where he wrote the song that made his wife cry when she saw it for the first time on stage, after her son was born:
“It’s Quiet Uptown”, the song about two parents witnessing the death of their child. It was written when Lin was taking his wife to a funeral for a lost loved one.
Now, THAT is called ART. He’s already a made artist.
It’s kind of a narcissistic move to cast yourself in the role of the main character, for a lot of my theatre teachers say that isn’t fair at all.
However, to be honest, Lin-Manuel Miranda did something I was never brave enough to do- DEFY the casting people who “play favorites” by casting typical actors and actresses to play roles over and over again.
In his interview with the Rockefeller Foundation, where he ensured millions of teenagers in high school to get to see the Hamilton Broadway show for their U.S. history classes to help them go to college and fuel their education, Miranda said there were a lot of restrictions for him to play the roles he wanted as a Latino kid growing up in New York City. As a teenager in high school plays, if you had Spanish speaking family heritage in you, you were only allowed to play in shows like West Side Story and Man of La Mancha, and for Lin Miranda, those were his only choices to live by if he wanted to be an actor.
So one day in college (he went to Wesleyan), he said, “Why don’t I write a musical for Latino dudes MYSELF? Something that my neighborhood would resonate to? And cast myself in the role of a dude who runs a corner bodega on the street serving cervezas and cafes con leche?”
That was the birth of In the Heights, circa 2006, when I had just graduated high school.
Then he started to get a little cocky when he finally got to a very warm sandy beach in the Caribbean, soaking up the sunshine, when he went to a bookstore and found Ron Chernow’s book on the shelf, even though it weighed a TON, and he opened one part of it that jumped at him, that “sounded like the most hip hop thing a Founding Father has ever done.”
And get this, his explanation of that blew my mind in a way that sounded like Skeelo’s “I Wish”: “Yo, I wish I was a little bit taller, I wish I was a baller, I wish I had a girl who looked good, I would call her… I wish I was like 6’9″ so I can get with Mioshi, cause she don’t know me, but ya know, she really fine… Ya know what’s really whack? See I can’t even get a date, so how’m I gonna compete wit dat? -When in my car, I can’t even get a hello!!!”
That is EXACTLY where he got his idea for the song “My Shot”, because Hamilton was talking about how he was born out of too many failures, and like the Eminem song, he was going to lose himself in the moment, he only had one shot and didn’t want to miss his chance to blow: “I AM NOT THROWING AWAY MY SHOT!”
I guess that’s why “My Shot” has 44 plays on my iPod right now. #1 most played song on my iPod from the Hamilton soundtrack, is the one that never made the cut for the final performance: “Cheering For Me Now”, the song he wrote with music genius John Kander, the guy who wrote famous musicals with the legendary Bob Fosse.
And no, even though I’ve hated this musical for way too long, I still LOVE this song to pieces. His tenor singing in this song makes it amazing.
Wait, hold up, hold up… What is that??? I’m hearing music coming from my living room… What time is it? Shit, I’ve stayed up all night long. It’s… woah, 8 a.m. on the nose. My parents have gone to work… So who the hell is playing my All Time Low Future Hearts album? I thought I gave it to Alexander to hold onto…
“Alexander? Is that you? I thought you had to work at Target…”
*reads my paperback copy of Gail Carriger’s Etiquette and Espionage, book one of Finishing School, the pink book with the cool steampunk cover*
Wearing my Princess Ariel shirt. His legs crossed. Foot tapping the rhythm of track 9, “Don’t You Go”. Cinderella, my fur baby redheaded miniature dachshund smells dog on him, so she’s snuggled on his lap so dearly. She’s usually a skittish little thing for new people, but she’s only comfy with her favorites, particularly anybody who smells like dog. And he stole my secret stash of gum because it’s now sitting on the end table by my dad’s chair. And he’s chewing some.
As he’s reading, Lin blows a perfect bubble until it sticks to his nose, but not the goatee.
When he can speak, he puts the book down.
Lin: “Hi, Rachel!” *smiles*
SONOFA- … EEETCH BAY!
The King of Broadway is Dead.
Long live the King of Broadway.
*I take a seat next to him*
“I haven’t slept all night, I’ve been writing nonstop,” I say.
“Shhh, I know,” he says. “I think it’s time you take back your Circadian rhythm now.”
“But my phone is broken, it’s dead, and I will never get a replacement,” I say. “I’m dying here.”
“Relax,” he says. “Vamos a suenito.”
“But I hate smartphones. I’ve never owned a smartphone for 32 years, my whole LIFE.”
He says quietly, turning off the music and putting on Miles Davis on the Pluto TV channel: “Do you think I had problems adjusting from America Online to my first iPhone? Believe me, that’s kind of why I put the AOL dial up octave in that song you brought up in this blog post. Going from dial up to the future of technology, rising up to the occasion from poverty in the Colonies to prosperity of America, the Constitution, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness…”
The brain static won’t stop buzzing around in my head. The Latuda is starting to make me feel like I’m phasing, like the villain Ava, “Ghost”, in Ant Man and the Wasp.
I shout, “Make it STOP!”
Lin shushes me.
“Hey, no, no, no, no, no, shhhhhhh! It’s ok, it’s ok. Here’s a blanket. Go to sleep. I’ve got your bunny right here. Take a nap on the couch, as long as you need.”
“What about breakfast? What about dinner?”
“Easy, now. Sleep first. Food later. You’re exhausted. We need you at your best, but later. Go to sleep.”
“But the pain…”
“Hey, I feel you…. I really do. It’s going to be ok. Give it time. I’ll see you on the other side of your dreams. Good night, sweetheart. Dream your best. You’ll dream of better stories and you’ll write them much better when they’re fresh in your head in the morning. Sweet dreams. Oiche mhaith.”
So I hug my big fluffy fuzzy bunny Snowie, fall back on my mom’s pillows on the couch, and I’m out like a light.
And Cinderella, my furry baby longhair dachshund precious princess is snuggling next to me like this.
No more burning the midnight oil. Time for sleep. Na night.
Playlist selection- I can rap this song perfect, even many years later after I learned it in college for karaoke.
Lin, your (soundtrack) is my drug. I like your beard.
The full “King of Broadway is Dead” playlist, titled “2020 Tribute to Lin-Manuel Miranda” will be live on WordPress shortly. Stay tuned…
Copyright 2020 Lady in the Blue Box publishing, All Rights Reserved, all photos and images are not owned by the author and were pulled from YouTube and Google Images. Respect given to those artists.
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