Reason To Rhyme

Don’t think I’ve defected and left the Les Miz camp. You don’t do that. You just don’t. You become a fan, you’re a lifer. And if you like musical theater, you probably like most of the musicals to ever make it to Broadway. Anyway, now that we’ve gotten the disclaimer out of the way, let me start raving about Hamilton the Musical.

I was actually holding off before introducing it to my daughter because it’s geared toward an audience that’s more mature than a nine-year-old girl. However, there was the recent Tonys and, as you know, Hamilton ruled the night. My daughter loved the Hamilton numbers, including the opening parody for introducing James Corden, the host that night.

I personally love Hamilton. Telling a historical narrative through hip hop, it was brilliantly apt. I wasn’t a fan of rap and hip hop when I was young, but I grew to like it through the years. It’s different, of course, when it was just hype. Obviously, young people hopped on the trend and rode it. I just had no patience for that in all the hard-hearted angst of my alternative rock years (gosh, it’s not like I was in the mosh pit slamdancing to the Dead Kennedys; I was sitting in my room jonesing on Johnny Rzeznik’s blue eyes while listening to “Name”).

I actually liked listening to rap in the ’80s and then everybody thought they could rap and have the crotch of their pants hang between their knees, so it began to rankle. I totally lost my ear for it when some dumb boys I was acquainted with thought they were good enough to freestyle in some talent show and. Oh. My. Crap. I just about died of mortification.

The thing is that I think I could do rap. Not the beat or the rhythm or the attitude, but the rhymes. I used to write a lot of poetry. As a kid, of course, it was all about rhyming. For fun, I used to come up with silly limericks. And, yes, I was that weird kid my peers didn’t get. Even though I eventually discovered free verse and wrote a bunch of dismal crap that way, I just really loved rhyming. What can I do? I think rhymes are fun. I can appreciate free verse, especially if the use of words is really masterful and evocative, but I enjoy poetry with meter and rhyme more. This is why Isabella Gardner is just about my favorite poet. I love the pictures she paints with her words and the cadence of her verses.

I don’t know when I stopped writing poems. The last ones were for my daughter. I meant to write one for every birthday, but I stopped after her third. I’d love to go back to that person though, the one that spews out poems like the gush of expletives after an ungainly face-plant (can anybody do a graceful face-plant though?).

I have to tell you, there are people who get such a high from telling things in rhyme. I think about all the work Lin-Manuel Miranda put into coming up with Hamilton the Musical and get a little flutter in my heart because, man, that must have been a blast.

I may never write enough words to create a musical or even a poetry anthology, but perhaps I can dig deeper within the copywriter and come up with fun birthday limericks for the boys and pretty verses for my tween girl. Who knows? I could even do it again for expression, but I really don’t want to dig too deep. I’m not ready to be that honest with myself; it’s scary. Someday though.