My HAMILTON obsession

Many people are surprised to learn that I am not actually knowledgeable in the field of musicals. I do not know the big stars of Broadway that are not widely known in popular culture. I never know anything about current or upcoming musicals. I like jukebox musicals. Outside of the musicals in which I have performed, my knowledge base is quite small. I could title a book Everything I know about Broadway I Learned From Watching the Tony Awards. Starting in probably 2000, I watched the Tony Awards and the next day would the Cast Recording of the show with the musical number that most impressed me. I continued that trend until the last few years when I stopped watching the awards as a live event.

In 2008, I sat down to watch the awards like I always did, and then something magical happened. A young Latin man in a newsboy cap stood next to Whoopi Goldberg as she introduced a musical medley to a show called In the Heights. 15 seconds into Lin-Manuel Miranda’s opening rap from that show, performing as both story teller and protagonist, I downloaded the cast recording on iTunes.

You have to understand something, even at 28 years old, the middle section of the Ven Diagram of People Who Like Broadway Cast Recordings and the People Who Like Rap Music, was like a sliver of a sliver, to me. The middle section could be counted on one hand, maybe not even needing all five fingers. Now I was watching the Tony Awards where a dude was rapping, and not rapping in a Sondheim way, but like spitting serious bars.

Thus my love affair with Lin-Manuel Miranda was born.

I have been trying to attack HAMILTON on this blog for a few weeks now, looking for the angle from which to write. Do I write as an unadulterated fan boy of the creator? Do I write from the angle my Degree in English taught me, looking motifs, themes, poetic devices? Should I write as a hip-hop lover, analyzing the insane rhymes, and how those rhymes are articulated? Ultimately, I am choosing to look at this show, the way I often do on this blog, the way it inspires me.

When I was 13 I wrote the first short story I remember writing. It was about a 13 year old boy and his younger brother who accidentally witness a mob hit. No one believes them because they are kids, and the two boys worry that the mob will come after their family, so they get on their bikes and take off. The rest of the story involved them dodging bullets, setting traps, etc. It was like Home Alone or Three Ninjas as a road trip movie. At 16 I wrote a fantasy story where Bill and Ted and the Ninja Turtles were called to a distant land by a mystical figure named ADOY who wanted them to save Princess Butterfinger from Vanilla Ice, who had enslaved his planet using battle rhymes. Bill, Ted and the Turtles turned out to be useless, and eventually Princess Butterfinger saved herself and her planet. My senior year in high school I took a horror literature class and our final project was to write a scary story. I wrote a story about a bunch of people stranded in a hotel where people start getting murdered. It was a fairly standard slasher story except, I had two killers with separate agendas, killing people not knowing the other was killing people as well. My teacher asked for the stories to be at least 5 pages long; mine was over 20.

“Why do you write like you’re running out of Time?” So goes the main theme of the Act One Finale of Hamilton. “Who Lives? Who Dies? Who Tells Your Story?” So goes the main theme of the Act Two Finale. Lin-Manuel Miranda has created two hip-hop based musicals around men who wonder what their legacy will be. The resolving event of In the Heights is the protagonist, Usnavi, coming to terms with his legacy being the guy in Washington Heights who tells the stories of those around him, coming full circle as our narrator. He opens the show introducing us to the characters, but after the opening number, he stops being a narrator, until the end. He realizes the importance of telling stories, and how legacies are built through story telling. In HAMILTON, He writes the story of two men obsessed with their legacies, but coming at those legacies from two different angles. These two men have become forever linked in the history of our country. Aaron Burr’s eventual act of murder changed the legacy of both men. Hamilton is reduced in history books as the guy who was killed by Burr, and is on the $10.00 bill. Burr is not remembered for his push for women’s rights or as an ally of women. He is remembered solely as the guy who killed Alexander Hamilton. Both forever immortalized for my generation in the original Got Milk? advertisement.

Lin-Manuel Miranda aimed to change the legacy of both men through the power of words. His layered, lovely hip-hop Opera mines every ounce of genius I can imagine to create a complex and powerful story about the power of writing. I am a believer in this power. Stories create life. If you want to know about a time a period, read the stories that were written in that era. Read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 to learn about the fears people in the 1950s dealt with. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible manages to tell us about two separate time periods and how they link. Stories are vitally important.

At the age of 13 I knew that. I essentially wrote a story about the lengths I would go to protect my family. I was willing to run away and take on the mob with just my little brother. In high school I wrote about a woman strong enough to do what male movie heroes were too inept to do. As a senior, I understood the tropes of slasher flicks and added my own spin onto them. Scream had come out and shown that tropes still worked if you understood them and could deconstruct them. Telling stories have purpose.

At some point in my twenties I lost the confidence to tell stories. I also lost the confidence to care about my legacy. I stopped thinking I had a legacy.

Now, as I claw my way back from the trash heap of self-doubt, I can turn to HAMILTON for help. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s show is chalk full of reminders about the power of words, especially the power of the written word. In the show, Thomas Jefferson is so scared of Hamilton’s power, that even after Hamilton is fired and after he has smeared a current sitting president, leaving him seemingly powerless, Jefferson remarks “As long as he can hold a pen, he’s a threat.” The people with the ability to write are threats. Those who tell the stories create the world.

Not only does HAMILTON do that, it also shows the importance of Point of View, of representation. Miranda chooses to make Hamilton’s immigrant status a driving force, making the story instantly relatable to our world. It is a show that matters NOW. It shows how writers shape a narrative. It is impossible for me to hear Hamilton and Lafayette gleefully exclaim “Immigrants, we get the job done,” without thinking of the current landscape of our country. I think of my wife’s family, and all that they have accomplished, knowing immigration, for them, is important. I think about the stories of my students, many of whom are immigrants, or First Generation American Born. Lin-Manuel Miranda helps give voice to the voiceless.

I am a straight white male, so I have had a voice my entire life. I see representations of my life on screen, on the page often, but what I do not see is good representations of obese people. Obese people, in film, are often the comic relief, or worse, thin people in fat suits, making fatness their absolute joke. I have stories to tell as an obese person trying to get healthy, or about obese people trying to live in a country where fat jokes often feel like the last safe “politically incorrect” joke grouping. Two of the four main characters in my first novel, which you will all hopefully be able to read in 2016 or 2017 (I’m not giving up on this book), are overweight. One is obese and clearly modeled after me, and the other, a female character, is overweight. I think the stories I tell for them are unique. They are not stories we see often. I have been nervous about continuing to write stories featuring overweight people, and I understand that my character’s weight is important to the story of my first novel, but I kid you not when I say, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s HAMILTON, has helped me realize, I can tell stories about obese people for as long as I want, and I can make their obesity a main part of the story, like Hamilton’s immigrant status, or not. Characters can simply be overweight because people are overweight, so that is what I intend to do. Not everything I write will be focused on that, but I feel like obese characters deserve to have their stories told too.

Lin-Manuel Miranda also writes shows with strong women, giving power to the women of history, about whom we know little. He has a voice, and he wants to give his voice to many differing groups of people. I admire this. I want to do this. I want to give voices to all kinds of people. It is why I highlight stories of minority people (People of Color, women, Transgender) on my various social media platforms, but I also want to learn about their experiences and write characters who share those experiences. It is important for all people to see people who look like them, or read about people who look like them, not as a token, but as a fully realized character. All of the characters in HAMILTON are fully realized. They all have bits of their own stories in the show. All of these stories are important. And if you are obsessed with Lin-Manuel Miranda like I am, you know that on his Twitter, he continues to illuminate the stories of the people his characters represent. He loves them all, and wished he could have crammed of the stories into his show.

The mantra of Miranda’s Alexander Hamilton is “I am not throwing away my shot.” This is my mantra for 2016. I want to live by the same ideas that drove Miranda’s protagonist. This idea of taking advantage of every day. This goes beyond writing, and gets to the original focus of this blog when I started it years ago: my health. I have been throwing away my shot for most of my thirty-five years. That stops now. So, when I post things on Twitter, or Facebook or Instagram about my physical health, I am going to hashtag them #notthrowinawaymyshot

Lin-Manuel Miranda speaks to the educator in me, the English degree thinker in me, the hip-hop lover, the musical lover, and ultimately the writer in me. Hamilton embodies all of those things and so much more. I want to simultaneously enjoy it as a fan, while analyzing why Burr raps as a narrator but as Burr he refuses, or where in Burr’s life is he looking back and realizing his legacy was tarnished by the violence. I want to craft a whole unit surrounding this show to teach in tandem with a history teaching about the Founding Fathers. I want to get with other hip-hop fans and be amazed at how he manages to fit so many words into a bar, and how he uses rhymes to further a character. Pay attention to how Lafayette raps at the start, versus during “Guns and Ships’ towards the end of our time with him. Talk about showing and not telling character growth. I also want to talk to other hip-hop fans about the hip-hop references, the love letter to hip-hop that is engrained throughout the show, from the obvious "10 Duel Commandments", to the more subtle Right Hand Man referencing Busta Rhyme’s “Boom goes the Cannon” from “Scenario.” Mostly though, HAMILTON makes me want to write all of the time, and tell all of the stories I possibly can in the best way I know how.