Ahhhh youth....

Troy and I went to opening night of this musical called bare. Before I go any further, I want to make clear that should anyone from the Baltimore theatre community actually stumble upon this, the following words are in no way a critique of the actual production of bare in Baltimore. The following is more my commentary on adolescent life as a result of going to see bare this past Friday.

I remember seeing advertisements for this show in a Playbill years ago when I was in NYC on vacation with my mother. It looked interesting, but managed to open and close in New York before I had sufficient time to become intrigued. Then last summer, my friend Jennie (the same one with the great taste in wine) was playing something from it in the car. Again, it sounded vaguely interesting, but not enough to compel me to find out more. Then some sufficient hype was raised this summer in Baltimore when casting began for this project. Many of my friends and other artists with whom I've worked in the past had been cast, so I went to see it. In case you're not familiar, it's a show about these two boys at a Catholic boarding school who are best friends and lovers. The show follows their closeted relationship in the homophobic microcosm that is Catholic boarding school through their senior year.

What I took away from the show was most simply that teenagers are quite possibly the most annoying people on the face of this planet. Don't get me wrong. I know some very cool teenagers. But the fact that they manage to be remotely cool now is just a testament to the fact that they're going to be beyond incredible human beings when they mature into adulthood. To make a broad and sweeping generalization, however, teenagers are melodramatic, manic, self-involved creatures. They think that the world begins and ends by whatever situation they manage to find themselves in at the moment. And many of these situations, however avoidable should they have chosen to use just a hint of judgement, are nowhere close to the be-all end-all of scenarios that will play out in their lives (for the most part, at least).

Watching this show forced me to remember my own experiences in high school. I remember people dropping catch phrases such as, "These are going to be the best times of our lives!" And even then, I vaguely remember rolling my eyes in adolescent cynicism and thinking that there was no way that my life was going to go completely downhill after high school. What I've learned in the past six years since, however, is that every stage of your life is supposed to be the best time of your life. Your twenties are the best time of your life until you reach your thirties. Your thirties are the best time of your life until your forties, and so on and so forth.

And I'm just thankful that I made it through my teenage years. I don't think that they were nearly as tumultuous as for these poor little boys in bare, but they certainly weren't easy. I'm even more thankful that I'm now surrounded by people who love me and are loveable in return, and that I've learned (for the most part) to stop whining and stand up for myself.

PHEW!

Rant completed.