Diana Kleinman*’s twelfth birthday was a sleepover. About a dozen of us were invited to her nice, clean home the San Fernando Valley. We played truth-or-dare, whacked a piñata, and ordered pizza. After clapping our congratulations at Diana over her ability to blow out twelve candles with a single exhalation, we all went upstairs, unrolled our sleeping bags, and spent the next two hours singing our little pre-teen hearts out to the RENT soundtrack.
It was 1997 and RENT had been on Broadway for a year. My school show choir (which I was a member of – and if you ever use this piece of information against me, I swear to god, I will choke you with my sparkly cummerbund) performed “Seasons of Love” at the spring concert. And my gang of pre-pubescent white friends and I floated through our days at Portola Middle School half entranced in another world three thousand miles away – in our hearts, we lived in Alphabet City, and we were a part of that decrepit, starving, diseased, yet utterly glorified community presented to us by Jonathan Larson’s play.
Hey, the nineties were MESSED UP.
Sometimes I think about how I wanted to live on Avenue B when I was 16 and now as a grown-up New Yorker I think, there’s not even a train there.
