There are three musicals that I used to know all the lyrics to: “Beauty and the Beast”, “Once On This Island”, and “Rent” Each one encompassed a particular period of my life, and “Rent” reminds me of my junior and senior year in college, especially because my roommate at the time was quite obsessed with it. Being in college, the Bohemian lifestyle, the conflict between making money and making art—these things all resonated.

Jonathan Larson adapted Puccini’s “La Vie Bohème”, changing the setting from Paris in the 1800s to NYC in the 1990s, and the plague besetting the characters is AIDS instead of TB. As I learn more about HIV, parts of the musical waft through my brain, and sure, it’s a consumer-friendly version, sanitized and airbrushed, nowhere near as messy as the real thing, but what is amazing is the advances in treatment that have occurred in the past 10 years.

The sad thing is that it is not necessarily the virus itself that baffles us. Sure, we don’t have a cure, but at least we now have ways of controlling it. The problem is that you need to have thousands and thousands of dollars to afford the drugs. And so atrocities occur in this country, to say nothing about what happens in developing countries, particularly in Africa.

HIV (like many health care issues) is intimately tied with the inequity of resource distribution inherent in our peculiar economic institutions, and it seems that talking about inevitably leads to talking about dreaming of the coming revolution.

I’m not sure if this might have been when my infatuation with NYC may have started. “Rent” came out in 1996, and I remember those sticky August nights in Manhattan in 1997, doing the tourist things, being obsessed with complex tangle of subway lines, watching “Les Misérable” on Broadway, dreaming of things turning out for the better.

My oldest friend, and then my good friend from college, and now my sister have all moved out the NYC, the wounded autumnal city. There is something apocalyptically prescient about the line that discusses “living in America at the end of the millenium” and while there were worries about Y2K, the Fall of the Republic will likely be remembered in the history books as beginning with November 7, 2000.

Man, Rosario Dawson is hot, but anyway.

Wow, that was quite convoluted and rambling.