Tear Down That Wall

Inspirational song: The Origin of Love (Hedwig & the Angry Inch)

I had to hide from it all. The anxiety of the last few days was too much, and I took a mental health day. Nevermind that it was planned for the entire calendar year. It came at exactly the right time. I needed to get away right now. But even my escapism has overtones of tension, in the form of an East Berliner transsexual glam rocker. I'd never seen Hedwig & the Angry Inch all the way through, even though songs from the movie are all over YouTube. I'd never read the story line either. I was saving the whole thing to be a surprise, knowing that my darling friend with the season tickets to the DCPA and I were going to experience it for the first time together. We had seen Neil Patrick Harris kill it at the Tony Awards a couple of years ago, performing Sugar Daddy, right before he won the award for his role that night. That was honestly all we knew.

The story is intense and unusual to say the least. Hedwig starts life as Hansel, a boy in East Berlin, during the time before the wall fell. Barely into adulthood, he falls in love with an American serviceman who demands a sex change operation, which his mother arranges. It was not done well. Afterwards, having assumed his/her mother's name, she lands in Kansas, near the air force base in Wichita. Divorced, she begins a career as a rock singer/songwriter. And that's more than I knew going into the show. The music is loud and passionate and it rocks. The story is touching and infuriating and redemptive. The narration is effing hilarious at times, poignant at others. I am absolutely in love with this story now. I'm so glad my friend and I went, and I'm glad we let it be a surprise. Now I need to buy the soundtrack, probably two different versions: the movie and the NPH Broadway recording.

For a whole day, I got to pretend the world was totally okay. We got dolled up. I put on my makeup (more than I usually put on my face). We took the train in so that we could drink heavily at lunch. (And even after my discussion with the waitress about gluten, my bloody mary showed up with a fried chicken wing on top of it. Dammit. At least they were bottomless, and I could switch to mimosas after a freshly made attempt reminded me why I so rarely drink bloody marys.) We walked around downtown Denver casually, between the train station and theater and then back again. We people watched. We smiled more than I've had cause to in a while. We enjoyed holiday decorations. We kicked back and had Irish coffees while we waited for our train home. And we couldn't stop exclaiming how incredibly wonderful the whole day away was.

While I wrote, I let the Hedwig songs autoplay on YouTube, and it rolled over into the NPH Tonys opening numbers. It just ended on "If life were like the theater, life wouldn't suck so much." Ah, so true. We could all use theatrical escapism now and then. Some of us more than others.