I Cry at Hamilton

I really do. And not just solitary drops of anime tears. I full blown ugly cry uncontrollably every time I watch Hamilton in person. I believe this is because it is, to me, the single greatest work of art created thus far by humankind. And it’s not like I didn’t have something else occupying that spot in my heart until Hamilton came along. Commensurate with my maturity as a consumer of arts, there were two other such works––from other domains––that gave me brain boners, before Hamilton came along.

When I first stumbled upon visual depictions of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona as a child, I remember being somewhat confused. Did real life look like that sometimes, in some places? Surely you must be joking Mr. Feynman. It felt more like it was from a video game: the type of place that can only be rendered by bits, not built by hand. Even video games weren’t that advanced in terms of graphical processing power in the 90’s, but the 20-30 second cinematic cutscenes that probably took the animators 4 months to put together was the only visual language that was comparable to my mind’s eye upon trying to visually process Sagrada Familia with my human eyes.

Then I saw it in person, in 1998, during a family trip to Spain. Looking back, it’s trippy to imagine that at the time of that visit, that country had only said goodbye to their dictatorship 18 years prior. A democracy that was just turning drinking age. They didn’t speak much English (and neither did I), but they seemed happy. And it was clean, and crisp, and well-designed, and things were pretty to look at. Apparently that was the language I used at the time “Mom! This is nice to my eyes!”. Maybe they tried to explain to me the concept of “aesthetics” and I added something new to my vocabulary––or maybe not. But the me in 5th grade was definitely achieving some intuitive comprehension of the subject internally. The wheels were turning.

But unfortunately, I didn’t get to go inside Sagrada Familia during that trip. It was 3 or 4 families in our group––my dad’s high school friends––and the grown ups were making all the decisions. And they didn’t see enough of a reason to move heaven and earth to arrange entry into a weird building we saw from the outside that I had recognized from the media catalogue in the library of my brain, because there was a massive line outside it (I think that was the reason). Apparently I was a good boye as a child who didn’t insist on stuff. Yes meant yes and no meant no. And by golly, I didn’t like inconveniencing people (likely because I didn’t want people inconveniencing me). So I was gonna have to wait for another spring to plug into the matrix and go into that video gamey world. I was pretty sure it was still gonna be there when I found my way back there.

It didn’t happen until 12 years later. Not seeing it, merely going back to that city. I had a 3 days sojourn there while I was escaping from my years in Norway when the bitter winters and the lack of sunshine definitively defeated me. Those 3 days is a whole story all on its own (and probably not exactly appropriate for the tone that I’m going for on this blog), but the unfortunate point is that once again I failed to enter the fantasyland house during this trip. Not enough time to buy tickets in advance to the show that’s been sold out for years (just like Hamilton).

Let’s fast forward another 4 years and now we mean business. During an extended taking-the-long-way-home type of trip with my long-term partner at the time, we are in Barcelona to do ALL the things that one ought to do. We bang out all the other Gaudi buildings, all the museums––Picasso, Miro, the design one, even the ethnography––, go watch Real Madrid play Cornella in Copa Del Rey at the El Prat, bike across the entire town maybe twice over, treading tires in almost every neighborhood. And you’re goddamn right we bought our Sagrada Familia tickets days in advance. It’s happening.

It met and exceeded expectations. It was dreamlike. It’s clear as day in my head, to this day, the way it felt like a fugue state in there. This was early Fall, so it wasn’t terribly hot and humid––because I know how that can create that 20% passed out hypnotized feeling you can find in the south in the US. Exactly the reason why New Orleans is such a trippy place, and exactly why Atlanta doesn’t feel real.

The colors were so bright, and made my chest feel pleasant. I had finally ended up needing eyeglasses a year prior. My eyes felt nice, like I had told my mom. In the years that elapsed between my first and second visits to this town, video game engines had improved dramatically. The Final Fantasy games in 1998 were epic more because of the story. By merely 2003, with FFX, now that was blurring the lines between Barcelona and Spira. So for the following hour or so, I was not of earth but got sucked into the TV with the PlayStation still powered on.

It was everything I expected it to be, and then a whole bunch more that I would not have known to expect––which seems to be the benchmark for GOAT level art. Sagrada Familia, my friend, you-are-IT.

For now.

Half a decade or so after this, I had my first experience with psychedelics, in a modality that was designed to have lasting effects for several months. And during those months I watched Damon Lindelof’s The Leftovers. And along the journey of slowly making my way through that show, I, under my breath, declared the second season of that show the greatest piece of art ever created. I was wearing biochemically induced rose colored glasses, so it does come with an asterisk of sorts. But regardless, experientially, it was the most amount of feelings induced in me by a piece of art to that day. Move over Sagrada Familia, there is a new vibrator that is making my chest move at tastier altitudes on the Richter scale.

One of the ways that I divide creatives is how some people are good at creating original concepts (while not necessarily also being good at their execution), and some people are not good at coming up with novel premises but are fantastic at improving on existing ideas. I think Damon Lindelof might be the most talented person at the latter––at least among people who make television.

They brought him into the writer’s room of L05T! (which is how I always liked to spell Lost, as it was a good representation of what my face looked like at the end of many a cliffhanger episode––and right now I really want to I reactivate the olden days of discussing theories with friends on MSN messenger), and Lindelof made L05T! into what it was: a juggernaut of a TV show and an era (and generation) defining work of art. One generation had their minds cracked open by Star Trek, and they became Trekkies, and those people grew up to work on television to create things like L05T!. My generation had a formative experience getting mind-fingered by the week-to-week-to-year insanity of L05T! and I guess a lot of us became Losties and came around to create our own thing. I’m creating this right here in front of you. Have I fully internalized telling a story in the background while executing it through a B-plot from the past? Am I building up to this big mystery of what Hamilton has done to me while giving you “weekly” doses of Kate’s wedding to Nathan Fillion, or my childhood exposure to Sagrada Familia, or Jack’s dad passing away in Australia, or what was happening to me physiologically while consuming The Leftovers, or how Locke’s dad was a con artist who caused him to become crippled? Did influential media make my thinking flashback-heavy, or was my (and so many others’) mind(s) already that way and that is why we all respond to this type of thinking––and writing? Maybe people who think this way comprised the writing room of L05T!. Maybe it’s the Abed in me from that 6th season episode where they get stuck on the road in an RV and their escape hinges on convincing Abed to abandon his flashbacks. Autism harps heavy sometimes.

And just like how he made some else’s idea into something fantastical, he also applied the same skills to a pretty good novel by Tom Perotta (whose work always follows cinematic beats, which makes them easy to adapt: Election, Little Children, Mrs. Fletcher, etc) and created a goddamn masterpiece of TV that fingerblasts your amygdala episode in and episode out. It has a similar architecture to L05T! in how the story is scaffolded by a big mystery and is mostly about the human stories that happen under that umbrella. It is smart in not being preoccupied much about the godly mystery itself, and giving enough information for people to develop their own conclusions (per their POV’s, life experiences, and belief systems), but not too much that it would dissatisfy people who don’t have enough room left to create their own interpretations.

A lot of fans of the show become apologists of the first season, literally because while the second and the third seasons are straight up perfect 10/10 television, the first season is like a 9.7. Relativity at its finest. Stand right next to your friend (or sibling) who looks a lot like you but is veeery slightly more symmetrical and you’ll suffer the same nonsensical consequences. A few years ago I was working with a client (who, at the time, was easily one of my favourites) who impulsively started apologizing for the first season as soon as she found out about our shared fandom of The Leftovers and I immediately interrupted her to dish out a version of the above explanation. The work with her revolved around handling anxiety and a life-long baseline emptiness/depression while getting her ADHD under control. It later turned out she had some degree of Complex-PTSD underneath all of it as the central core root of the devil. As cool a person she was, she definitely lacked a stable sense of identity, and in my experience, catching up on that incomplete part of her internal systems, her sense of self, was the treatment. She had a narcissistic mom and (seemingly) an autistic (and distant + unavailable) dad––who was unavailable mainly because he had another family elsewhere. When you have the kind of overbearing (jerk of a) mom that she had, you usually don’t get enough space to develop your own sense of self, preferences, desires, and perspectives, causing you to be underconfident, leaving you unable to make your own decisions.

So in one full year of therapy, much of what we did was internal-investigations and self-discovery, through both her personal life as it was happening to her, as well as philosophical discussions––sometimes about TV shows. I actually distinctly remember how The Leftovers came up with her too: she was talking about how when she was young, she didn’t think she had a personality, and instead she was just trying to replicate the behaviors of others around her. I assured her that this was likely just the amount of autism she had inherited from her dad, and that, independent of neurodivergent traits, was something many people go through while growing into an adult, more or less in that fashion.

And I had mentioned to her the three characters/actors who had made me think “hey, I wanna be more like THAT” (One was Lee Pace, not a character in particular, but just the human, who has that “don’t make me mad lady or I’ll fuck your boyfriend” energy in the body of a gentle giant; the other (which, in retrospect is a bad choice) is Javier Bardem’s character in Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona, which is a movie I’ve watched easily 40+ times, and that character’s confidence in walking over to a table of ScarJo and Rebecca Hall and chatting them up with terminal confidence had inspired me [at about age 21] to aim for a similar amount of swagger deeper into adulthood [and to note, as to why this turned out to be a bad choice, is because it turns out I was too gullible and laughably innocent to such a degree that, during those 40+ viewings over 15+ years I thought he was a confident baddass, when in reality, it was the false bravado of a pretentious and self-important narcissist [[which I only realized when the 4Xth viewing was with someone who was an incredibly subtle and insidious narcissist who was shockingly good at hiding what they truly were, who called out the BS of Bardem’s character immediately––fake recognizes fake!]]]; and the last one was Justin Theroux’s absurdly masculine police chief Kevin Garvey from The Leftovers, because as much of a high-ish value human I was able to eventually become in life, my vibe was still that of a gentle giant who seemed a bit too harmless––think of the comedian Pete Holmes [who is probably my spirit animal above everyone else]. The missing ingredient was a few more table spoons of Garvey/Theroux-like masculine energy and I could potentially be a mostly-formed adult in his final form.)

So we drove home the point that one should never apologize for the slight imperfections in one’s favourite TV show of all time––especially while evangelizing it to potential new viewers (or to others who already adore and swear by that show). Eventually that client developed a more or less full identity, became more sure of themselves, stopped feeling like her mom was just behind her shoulder ready to put her down and criticize her opinions, and was able to both come off anti-depressants, and they also stopped getting C-PTSD triggers where they would have random moments of the bottom dropping out and feeling terror without activating a memory. One year of sustained work usually does the trick. And a stable sense of identity is still undefeated.

I had watched the first season of The Leftovers before the psychedelic experience. And while watching the episodes exclusively one at a time, with at least a few days in between, I would regularly talk to a friend with whom I used to discuss TV shows a lot, and I’d routinely convey the visceral reactions that I was giving to the show without being able to point out to much in the show itself. And this was only vaguely because I didn’t want to spoil it. It was mostly because it wasn’t about the subject matter, or the discrete events that were happening in the scenes on the show. It was the feeling that was being evoked through its execution of the mood, the vibe, the aura. You could freaking smell the feelings in the air on that show. I actually wrote two papers (at least partly) based on that show in grad school: one for a course on couple’s counseling, and one on grief. That show’s setting was magic because the omnipresent phenomenon looming behind and above everything was a protracted feeling of grief caused by an unexplainable power that made humans feel terminally helpless and insignificant and lacking in agency. How did people cope with that? Well, that was exactly what the show was.

The third season was all sorts of fantastic, as a finale, and a landing of the plane. And probably equally as good (i.e. perfect) as the second season. But that second season spoke to me in such an intimate, pinning me down and whispering into my ear, and fingering my heartstrings and massaging my striatum way that for a while it became my favourite piece of art that I had ever consumed.

Especially in that second season, each episode felt so dense and filled-to-the-brim in affective content that it was straight up unconscionable for me to watch two episodes in a row. It was giving me so much to chew on. It wasn’t too often in life that I had found things that I could properly sink a full set of teeth into––and this was, to that moment, the nicest, coziest, and juiciest thing that I had sunk my teeth into. I’d routinely go for walks after watching episodes, and would stare at the distance while trying to wrap my mind around the emotional content of what was happening in the show.

The most similar memory of my visceral reactions and what I did in this instance would probably be what I ended up doing with my mind and body upon completing Infinite Jest back in the Spring of 2011. It was a sustained marathon of 2-3 hours of daily reading for about two months at the time. And when it was complete, I had to get out of the apartment, and go somewhere where I could simultaneously be among people and also alone. Washington Square Park just a short walk from my apartment was adequate, and I went there on that sunny day, sat down at a bench on west side of the park, closer to the road than the fountain, put my palms against my head, and started shaking back and forth trying to wrap my mind around the cyclical möbius strip of story that I consumed over 1079 pages. The fleeting moments where I understood what the story was and how it came together was so absurdly delicious, stuffed between the moments that would precede and supersede that would render me confused again. This was Grant Morrison levels of chaos magic executed through literature. And it had made me feel alive. So, fucking, alive. And I actually remember thinking that the first season of The Leftovers had a Wallace’ian sensation to it. A peek into the dirty human layer of a clean looking society in the east coast of the US, where people are struggling majorly with an alarming lack of mental stability. Maybe even a Lynchian, if not Kafkaesque, vibe in the air. Big words, incomplete sentences. Sureally discomfiting degrees of self-consciousness. Humans trying inhumanly hard while trying to find a point when everything seems utterly pointless.

That friend I’d discuss shows with at some point had remarked “this show sounds like some freaky girl you’re sleeping with on the side with whom you have such an inappropriate relationship with that you’re embarrassed to properly acknowledge or talk about it”. It wasn’t a half-bad description. And granted, by the time I had started the second season, I had those aforementioned biochemically induced psychedelia steaming above my head robustly (which wasn’t to fade for another few months). But regardless, I could feel the sweltering heat of the Texas summer of season 2 so closely. People’s dresses, or sweaty t-shirts, the boundary between the cleanliness of the “sacred” town of Jarden, Texas and the frontier that would separate it from the dirt of the humanity just past the moat around it––it was so sense-catching. I suppose it was the explosion of dramaturgical resolution that I was overloading on. Luckily, having academically nerded out on theater and done a minor in Dramaturgy in college wasn’t taking me out of the experience by making me analyze the production. It was, at most, making me more receptive to the details of the world I was getting sucked into. Across all of these emotional rollercoasters, and a shocking singular episode called ‘International Assassin’, and a final scene of the season that would bring all the challenging affective content of the season into a soft and cozy home, this became my finest experience of consuming art of my entire life.

A year later, enter: Hamilton.

I’m of the Disney+ initiates. Not too abnormal, as I wasn’t even living in the States during the heyday of the Broadway production in 2015-2016 range. It was an extended period in my life where I had other concerns, and bigger problems, that Broadway or West End trips were not a thing. And then during the pandemic, Lin-Manuel and the crew made the socially conscious decision to green light the film version for the launch of Disney+. I had made a new gal-pal off a dating app at the time. One of the first times I had gone over to her place, she mentioned that she had a subscription, and I decided to put Hamilton on the background to pay a degree of attention to it on the side while we were chatting and chilling. I knew Renée Elise Goldsberry as she was a CMU alum and also Leslie Odom Jr who was a senior when I was a freshman. But other than that, I wasn’t terribly on top of who was who and of what to expect.

So just like someone who goes to a party where they don’t know most of the people, my mind wanted to do the safe thing of “hangin out” with whom I knew––my fellow Tartans. So when Goldsberry was all of a sudden the focus on stage 10 seconds into Satisfied to start her solo, my attention was forcefully grabbed by its pony tail and pinned down. The powerful beginning notes of Satisfied begged and demanded and hijacked my attention. And the literal moment she started rapping, so cleanly and so on beat, it felt like a knot dissolved in my chest––a knot that I didn’t know was there––and it was essentially the surrender you experience under hypnosis.

I normally don’t register the lyrics of songs all that much while listening. I’m almost positive I have a degree of auditory processing disorder, which might be contributing to this. But I’m also almost positive that most people don’t pay attention to lyrics either. How else do you explain ‘Pumped-Up Kicks’ surviving the radio in this era when it’s about committing a school shooting and ‘Semi-Charmed Kind of Life’ being the score for Tigger the Movie when the song is actually about crystal meth addiction. It still makes me chuckle, that one time I was on a date, and I had gotten a bit hype while we were in the car (she was driving) and wanted to share with her my new favourite addiction: listening to Pentatonix. And the second song I had put up was their cover of Charlie Puth’s ‘Attention’, which went like “You just want attention, you don’t want my heart”; and this girl had gotten silent––while I was jamming out hard––and had asked me “are you trying to say something?”. I was completely lost in response to this question, so she clarified if I was trying to say something to her with the song. I didn’t know how else to respond other than to say “no, it’s just a dope song that makes me wanna dance”. I didn’t say the part about how deranged it might be to send subliminal messages about bizarre paranoias on a first date (or any numbered date) out loud. Eventually she revealed what kind of person she was, which made me a conclude that a certain percentage of (if not the majority) of people who obsessively read into song lyrics must be people who think that there is a meaning, a scheme, a message behind everything. The type of people who think everything is about them, and that people must be sending them secret messages all the time. These types of people think this way mainly because they assume that everyone else is like them too, that is to say they spend an inordinate amount of time sending indirect communications to people around them. Really bizarre stuff. I can only imagine such a person spending too much time around someone with auditory processing disorder. It must be infuriating to try to send passive aggressive messages to someone by playing a carefully curated series of songs, only for all of that to fall on literally deaf ears.

And despite my limitations along these dimensions, I was hearing and comprehending everything Goldsberry was singing. She remembered that night she might regret for the rest of her days; she remembered those soldier boys tripping over themselves to win her praise; she remembered that dreamlike candlelight like a dream that she can’t escape. Damn, the lady can enunciate.

I had stopped talking to my friend, who was a majorly distractible person––so she just went elsewhere in the apartment doing something else. She may have tried to get my attention in the next several minutes. I wouldn’t know. Then a minute and a half into the song, she began her hard rap verse and it was helplessly evident that “I will never be the same” again.

It’s the part that goes:

“So, so, so

So this is what it feels like to match wits
With someone at your level! what the hell is the catch?
It's the feeling of freedom, of seeing the light
It's Ben Franklin with a key and a kite
You see it right?“

I swear on every grave I have ever seen that this was the goosiest and bumpiest moment of my life. Is this my version of ASMR? A certain series of sounds with a certain rhythm hijacks my spine and my chest and I am rendered “helpless”? Within the domain of visceral reactions to rap music, a comparable one from my past that I can think of could be the first time I popped Marshall Mathers LP to my discman in early 2001. It was at an airport, on the way to a ski trip with my family. My best friend at the time was traveling with us, and had encouraged me to buy the CD from the airport shop so we could listen to it on the plane.

“When I was just a little baby boy my momma used to tell me these crazy things

She used to tell me my daddy was an evil man, she used to tell me he hated me

Then when I got a little bit older I realized, she was the crazy one

But there was nothing I could do or say to try to changer her, because that’s just the way she was”

I think this one is the fantastical and pleasurable loss of my rap virginity by Eminem, while Goldsberry and Miranda two decades later awakened the true perverted rap slut in me. I was in trouble.

I couldn’t finish the show during that visit. Instead I daydreamed about it here and there for a few weeks and then got my own membership, and thus began the year of consuming the ever loving crap out of the two and half hours of Hamilton on a regular basis.

My college best friend, who also happens to be a musical theater slut (although he actually became a business professor in the end), can hear, register, and understand lyrics on sight. I believe he can do that because he has a maybe only slightly imperfect perfect pitch, and a powerful brain––not because he constantly parses for secret messages in songs. He could always fully comprehend the stories of musicals down to their minutiae upon first exposure. I remember being embarrassed after we got out of watching Wicked in college when he wanted to discuss things about the story I didn’t even realize had happened. I may have caught up in my own ways in the years that elapsed since then. Yet, obviously, without any musical talent whatsoever and a three-note singing voice, my ceiling would remain pretty low.

But not my rap skills!

Anyways, the point is that through a year of sustained exposure, I got a legitimately tight grasp on most of what the play had to offer––the stuff that would’ve taken my friend one viewing to internalize. I was making games of rhyming on beat for the hardest and tightest verses, while appreciating the 5D chess Miranda was playing with the rhymes-within-rhymes operation he had run through the entire musical.

“I’m a girl in a world in which, my job is to only marry rich

My father has no sons, so I’m the one, who has to social climb for one

I’m the oldest and the wittiest, and the gossip in New York City is insidious

Alexander is penniless

Oh, that doesn’t mean I want him any less”

Are you fucking kidding me? You’re rhyming:

Wittiest

with New York City is

and Insidious.

And oldest is also embedded into it, and in a single sentence of 15 words, you have cascading series of words that are rhyming increasingly more with each successive rhyme attempt. Your brain is thinking “Oh that rhymed”, only for you to say “Oh, my god that rhymed even harder” two and a half seconds later, only to be floored when he rhymes 4 consecutive words with the following 5th word inside the same sentence. Fuck me.

The partial word rhymes are also confusing. They are not visibly obvious to your mind’s eye, yet you feel it in your guts as you hear it:

I’m the one

Cl-imb for one

What are we doing here man––should we just pack it up? Since this is peak human achievement and all. Well, of course not. This is the benchmark now. Let’s see how the next genius of the next generation measures up to this. The Trekkie, to the L05T!ie to the Hamiltonian, let’s see what kind of formative experiences in developmental years will inspire what kinds of kids into writer’s rooms and Broadway theaters. In the meantime, let’s try to identify the parts of our lives that closely apply to the story of the play, a.k.a. “Omg, so tru!”.

Well, actually only one paragraph should suffice on that. Mainly because although it was truly exciting for me at the time, and meant a lot to me as a milestone in the story of my life, at this point I am more embarrassed of it than anything else: the year of me becoming an American citizen. Anyways, long story short “Immigrants! We get the job done!”. So I went, did my thing, got good degrees from good schools, then had setbacks, empire striked back, and the king returned, and voila—I didn’t need a Schengen visa anymore. Maybe I’ll revisit this thought exercise down the line when I have accomplished something of a more broader appeal (before I show the audacity to compare my approach to life to Hamilton’s), but there was an incredible morning of biking in the canyon the day after I did some Golden Teachers and I truly felt the meaning of Hamilton creating a financial system, an institution (in Wall Street), that was so well crafted that it stood the test of time for centuries and made such gargantuan human undertakings possible. The man had boundless energy to deal with his insecurities and abandonment issues and became the kinda gangsta whose echoes are blasting from Wall Street to Broadway. Holly hell Batman.

You know what? It’s my blog, let me be a bit self congratulatory. When Burr says:

“Hamilton doesn’t hesitate.

He exhibits no restraint

He takes and he takes and takes

And he keeps winning anyway

He changes the game

He plays and he raises the stakes”

That’s meeeee! I was already a bit like that but I think during the rebuilding years of recovering from some truly difficult ordeals, I think he gave me permission to lean into that side of me more, and liberally so.

And I really should clarify, I don’t wanna “win” dumb shit like how most people see life as a zero sum game and they wanna be right and “defeat” the other person by preventing them from getting what they want. I just like learning stuff, creating things, having a good time, and forgiving people who take it upon themselves to interfere with that. And when my nothing-bothers-me-really attitude infuriates them and they keep harassing me, I proceed to “change the game” and “raise the stakes” towards moving on and being happy again. Maybe it doesn’t seem exactly one-to-one but I love those lines and from the first time I heard them to each successive time, what I explained above was the meaning that reverberated in my brain. To each their own, eh?

This is not a part that resonates or has too much to do with me (hopefully) but the part in Non-stop that goes “Why do you always you’re the smartest in the room?” always gives me chuckles. Hamilton acts and operates like he is always the smartest, most competent, and industrious person around. He is showy about it—as part of his battles with insecurities stemming from being an orphan.The man is “noooon-stop” about needing to prove every day how he is the smartest most talented boy in the room with the most important story. But guess what, HE FUCKING IS. He is actually smarter than everyone else. He is more creative. He is more industrious. It really fucking seems to be HIS story above everyone else. He elevated himself the main-character status through sheer force of will!!!

And that, was clearly sooooooo annoying to everyone.

Okay, let’s not get bogged down in details. There is just so much, and (probably) endless YouTube video essays talking about all that (by people who actually have musical talent who can probably better critics of the work itself). Let’s move onto the juicy bits, namely my performance during the live performances.

New York City. Early Summer. Rogers Theater. I’m in town to see musicals and friends. Showtime is about five hours after the coach arrives into town. I am somewhat uneasy, because I am about to witness something I idealized for so long. I definitely have expectations, as it is impossible not to. At the same time, I realize that I might have just about any reaction, so, I suppose I am not too invested in the expectation of a particular reaction. I think that protected me.

I am on the main floor, towards the back, to the right. The show actually starts a bit abruptly, out of nowhere (despite the announcement). It’s cool, it’s fun, I’m having a good time. Nothing too out of the ordinary. I’m not even paying attention to the order of the songs, and which one is about to come next. I seem to be in the moment.

‘Satisfied’ dawns on the stage unexpectedly and I proceed to have a Pavlovian reaction as soon as I hear the first few notes. The feeling is one of having been caught off guard. The way I try to gather myself is akin to someone of importance walking into the room and me buttoning up my jacket and straightening my back. The notes keep flowing, and so do the tears.

I cry during the entirety of ‘Satisfied’, and then I calm down. My brain is not wasting time trying to understand the why of it. This might be one of the moments of my life where I’ve been the most present. At that point I had a partial expectation that it might also happen for ‘Wait For It’ but it doesn’t. The Brazilian lesbian couple next to me chat me up during the intermission, naturally suspecting I might be a superfan.

The next time the first notes of a song make my eyes salivate for Pavlov is for ‘Burn’ in the second half. The actor doesn’t look at all like Philippa Soo but she sounds exactly like her. It hits the right chords and I’m waterworks. My eyeglasses are getting wet and I’m inconsolable. The Brazilians seem to get inspired and join in some, though not as much as me.

I know I’m emotionally exhausted by the end of it because I just wanna eat bad bodega pizza afterwards. I want to go to one of the dirty, by-the-slice places and ingest heavy carbs. Comfort food is required. And clearly I have no mental resources left to resist eating heavy junky food. I am adequately tied up on knots that gluten can have its way with me.

I am a bit clearer the next morning. And while walking around in SoHo I text with that musical theater slut college friend. We talk minutiae for a bit about how the Peggy Schuyler that I saw was making so many little deliberate choices with the smallish part she had and that there was an absurd amount of acting taking place in the background, and how his first time seeing the show was with the original West End cast and Rachelle Ann Go looked almost exactly like his wife if you squinted a trace amount that it was creepy. Apparently during his first exposure he cried at Yorktown because he was preparing to expatriate towards potential adventures of his dreams and the “immigrants, we get the job done” part hit him hard as well.

Our conversations usually tend to have the rhythm of the scientific method where we talk about some discrete events and we then immediately try to develop some hypothesis (testable or otherwise) on the macro phenomena that might be happening in the background. This time, we decided that Hamilton was just simply perfect. As in, as far as human civilization has developed and progressed thus far, this is the peak lyric writing and performing of acting, dance, and movement that we were able to achieve as a species. And these people who do this show 8 times a week fully understand that they are in the privileged position of performing something transcendent, thus they really bring it every-singe-time. Not a half-assed second, not a mailed in word or expression. This was peak art, with well-defined borders (as far as what is meant to be put on stage), and essentially, there was a perfect way to do it. And something being at that level brings tears to your eyes.

While the first notes of Satisfied were coming in, I was, suddenly, face-to-face with something that I consumed, idealized, and fantasized about for years at that point. Real life sometimes disappoints people––imagination of a human is a wild place. There is that Paris Syndrome that Japanese tourists go through where they finally arrive to this overly romanticized place to find it full of graffiti and trash at every corner and they physically get sick––ostensibly the cognitive dissonance of the disappointment.

This was the opposite of it. As a consumer, I was of the subjective opinion that it was the greatest song ever created. (And Lin-Manuel also acknowledges it as the greatest thing he’s created, and if Lin-Manuel is peak composition talent, then the logic actually objectively follows as well). When I finally got to consume it in person, it was actually better than my years of idealization and wildest dreams. It surpassed my expectations and delivered more than anything has delivered in my life.

I was in the presence of greatness, and the only logical reaction was cry in awe.

4 months later I was in London. This time, I’m actually running an experiment. I wanna see what’s gonna happen with a repeat exposure. I get second row seats, slight right of the center. Expectations are rampant. I’m visiting with a very old friend who is an event organizer and I’m attending her events in the days leading up to the show running my mouth to anyone and everyone who’ll listen that “hey, btw, in two days I’m gonna be ugly crying in public––how about that?”. I am liberally getting carried away with the expectations, just to see if it’s gonna be enough to overpower the art.

It doesn’t. This time, I start bawling literally the moment it starts. I cry continuously for almost the entirety of the first half; I’m almost positive the actors playing Lafayette and Burr actually noticed it. The Korean girl next to me offers handkerchiefs. Satisfied increases the intensity of the sobbing for sure, but it’s a steady stream for almost the entire first half, by the end of which I’m exhausted and emotionally spent.

I think what was elicited was a state of extreme vulnerability. It was like someone grabbed me by the hair and loving had their way with me while whispering sweet somethings that spoke directly to my heart. It was like a breakthrough therapy session with a therapist that you trust with your life, the most intimate intercourse with the love of your life, all done under the perfect amount of MDMA. Something like that.

During the intermission I kept feeling embarrassed (which is something I almost never feel [mainly because I don’t do embarrassing shit, but also because I am good at being nice to myself]). I felt very visible, almost self-conscious (which, again, is something I never ever feel anymore), and I was affectively naked as all hell. I had fully surrendered to the art, gotten undressed, and the art gave me what I wanted from it––and I drank from a fire hydrant.

So much so that I wasn’t able to have much of an emotional reaction to the second half. I was spent, and there was nothing left. Even ‘Burn’ didn’t activate me (and to be frank, the actress’ voice was a bit too dissimilar to Philippa Soo’s, so that was a big part of it). You know how as a teenager something very ‘significant” happens and you’re convinced that it’s the end of the world and you cry into a pillow and then you spend the rest of the day in a haze. This was that. My brain really didn’t have much juice left to be as present during the second half, and the only thing I remember vividly is a finer understanding of the lyrics to ‘Who Lives Who Dies Who Tells Your Story’ in closing––possibly because I was awakening again with a second wind of energy by the end of the show (it was a matinee).

I don’t get the foodie stuff and fine dining all that much. When I travel I’ll go check out a 9 course meal place to get to know the local “fine” culture (and I do find that tasty), but as a 6’3’’ 200lbs big boi who does pull ups all the time, I need ingest a lot of food on the regular so I don’t have the luxury of wasting too much time for every meal. I just mix every nutrient under the sun in a blender, and drink that alongside brown rice, veggies, and animal protein for most meals. So although I’ve enjoyed watching FX’s The Bear, I’m not able to adequately empathize with people who chase some psychotic perfection in cooking the most perfect meal as a pursuit in life. Until now.

I think I finally get it. It’s about chasing perfection within a well-defined sandbox inside which you can, well, actually kinda reach legitimate perfection. Think about it: life is uncontrollable and it’s a big blob of a Jenga tower were most things are not even gonna come close to being “perfect” perfect. It is a diagnostic component of more than a few mental health conditions where people fixate on perfection (to their deep suffering). But you narrow down the sandbox adequately and have a controlled environment, and boom, I think you can have perfection.

A perfect dining experience is kinda possible. One restaurant, a 3 hour block, one table. That’s doable in life.

A perfect performance of the most brilliantly composed and directed musical theater within the confounds of the Victoria Palace or Roger’s Theater’s are doable. When everyone takes it so very seriously as it’s the job of a lifetime that most others in the same field will never even get a chance to sniff, and then you relax into the religiosity of the experience and awe people while you’re in awe yourself––and a whole group of people do it at the same time. That works, that’s perfection. In the whirlwind of the uncontrollable that is life, we can make the world perfect for two hours and thirty minutes.

And that’s more than enough.

At least it should be.

I hope it can be for you.

It is for me.