Is this Calcutta?

Is Bohemia dead?

Last week, the rock opera Rent came to Toronto for the last time. The show opened on Broadway in 1996, closed in 2008 and is wrapping up a North American tour through 2009/10. The original Mark and Roger, Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal, were performing in this tour, and I had every intention of going to see it.

But then, you know, life with a six month old who still gets up a couple of times in the night to eat got in the way. Life with a husband travelling on business, for whom a weekend trip to Toronto would have kind of been a pain in the ass. Life with a dog when we can't find a dogsitter.

And it made me wonder. Would it have made sense for me to be there at all, anymore?

When Rent closed on Broadway after its phenomenal 12 year run, it left a different city behind than it entered. A different world. In this world, in 2010 Angel would still be alive, battling out her medication bills with her HMO. But she and Collins would never have met anyway, since he wouldn't have been mugged in the first place. The individual does not take his life into his own hands by venturing in to Alphabet City. There's no vacant lot with a tent city anymore; real estate in Manhattan is far too valuable for that.

Someone else probably opened up the restaurant in Santa Fe.

And have I changed?

Rent was my anthem, my soundtrack. Through anything, through everything. Blasting as loud as I can stand it through any point in my life.

How do you leave the past behind when it keeps finding ways to get to your heart? It reaches way down deep and tears you inside out til you're torn apart. How can you connect in an age when strangers, landlords, lovers, your own blood cells betray? What binds the fabric together when the raging shifting winds of change keep ripping away?

I will always know exactly how many minutes are in a year.

So I own not a notion, I escape and ape content. I don't own emotion. I rent.

Ask me what's the time. It's gotta be close to midnight.

What was it about that night? Connection, in an isolating age. For once the shadows gave way to light. For once I didn't disengage.

Every Akita is named Evita.

Forget regret, or life is yours to miss.

It always will be my anthem. And yet, look at me now. Basically, I've sold out.

At midday, I'm the three piece suit.

My husband and I are dear old Mom and Dad.

The Village Voice is owned by a corporation and is going.. mainstream.

When you start to think, you know, Benny wasn't so bad...

The show opened at the right time. The world was just coming to grips with the reality of AIDS, and New York City's gay community was hit harder than anywhere. Manhattan wasn't the glittering town of million dollar bonuses and Sex and the City; instead it was gritty, tough. Dangerous. To live there, you had to be brave. Creative. Ingenious. Artistic. Bohemian.

Today, you just have to be loaded.

Still, had it been easy for me to get there, it's simple. I would have been there. But what I really would have loved would be to somehow teleport myself back to the Nederlander theatre in the fall of 2006, with Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal - and Taye Diggs, and Jesse L. Martin, and Idina Menzel, and all the rest of the original cast, with their original, new, beautiful, fresh energy. None of them were who they were going to become yet, none of them had anything to lose, and neither did any of us. It was a long time ago, and the world has changed.

Maybe in a dozen years or so my daughter will play Mimi in a high school musical. No, I think that I dropped my stash. Possibly. By that time it will be a retro piece, like Oklahoma. But I'll still be there.

The opposite of war isn't peace. It's creation. Viva la vie boheme.