What You Like Vs. Who You Are

I liked Wicked. Is that my personality now?

When I was a child, I loved musicals. Why wouldn’t I? Musicals are for children! Who better to appreciate all that stomping and spinning and jigging? Who else needs every subtext of a story made text, and set to a little tune? Who gets more delight from dressing up in 19th century rags, and painting their face like an animal? When I think back to a chubby, adolescent version of myself, wearing leggings and a Phantom Of The Opera t-shirt to school every day, sleeping under a 4 ft x 6 ft poster of Les Miserables every night, I try to “hold space” if you will, for that darling little fool.

In the past few decades, there have been efforts made to bridge the distance between “what is cool” and “musicals.” The Book Of Mormon is “funny” and “irreverent”! Hamilton is “hip-hop”! Crazy Ex-Girlfriend “talks about period sex”! I have no desire to shit on these cultural artifacts, (I’ll leave that to the actual hip-hop artists). I only tip my cap to their existence, because I missed the boat on all of them. The stuff I liked could never masquerade as anything but profoundly uncool. Could I still sing the entire libretto of Aspects of Love and The Secret Garden? I could. Did I count Nathan Lane and Mandy Patinkin among my adolescent crushes? I did. And in six grade, did I weep openly in the cafeteria while trying to recount the plot of Miss Saigon until a classmate told me I was making her uncomfortable? Reader, I wept. But again, I honor that former version of myself. Like Maurice with Eponine, I’m grateful for the sacrifices she made to shape my life, and I’m also glad she’s dead, because I don’t want to hang out with her.

And yet, in the words of Hurray for the Riff Raff (see? I also like COOL things!) the past is still alive. This week, I needed a night off from parenting. My patience has been on a short fuse. My three-year-old is potty training and keeps clogging the toilet with half a roll of toilet paper every time he shits. My kids are at each other’s throats, creating a revolving door in and out of the Time Out Chair. And somehow I failed to weaponize Santa, because when I threatened to call him about moving my 5-year-old to the naughty list, my child told me flatly “Santa’s not real.” I’ve been at my wits end, and you can only drink so many Negronis before they start to make things worse instead of better. I decided to go to the movies. And maybe it was because I was sure my husband would never see it with me, or because I wanted to be part of the cultural conversation, or maybe it was because that inner child in the Phantom swag knew better how to soothe my weary soul than this grown woman covering in salad dressing stains does, I felt compelled to go see Wicked.

Do you think Ariana Grande looks cross-eyed here?

Reader, I’m not here to tell you that Wicked is a perfect movie. But I will say that those almost-three-hours in a movie theater — spent mostly misty eyed from songs I’d never heard before — warmed this tired mom’s heart. Unburdened by the judgmental eye of my husband, who is truly a snob, cloaked in the anonymity of a dark AMC, I began to wonder, am I someone who likes musicals? Not someone who liked musicals? I was so surprised to find myself looking forward to the next big dance number, charmed by the clear, kinda reedy tenor specific to a musical theater star’s pitch. What I felt wasn’t nostalgia, or an ironic fondness for something so bad it’s good. I just LIKED it. It made me feel HAPPY. WHO THE FUCK AM I????

When you’re an adolescent, having just popped the seams of the confident wildness that protected you in childhood, not yet armed with the tools to truly know who you are but burning with the self-conscious need to express it, you fumble for something that already exists to explain yourself to the world. What you like serves as shorthand for who you are. I couldn’t tell you who I was as a teenager, but I could show you my Ani DiFranco CDs and my collection of Delia’s dresses, tell you I won a Denver Post essay contest and was planning to go to Sarah Lawrence, and ask you, is this something? Do I have anything here, personality-wise? In retrospect, what a funny way to ask people to know you. What would I present to people now? I listen to Julia Louis Dreyfus’ Wiser Than Me podcast religiously. I take a lot of spin classes. “Buy Dirt” by Jordan Davis and Luke Bryan was on my Spotify Wrapped list. But if that’s my personality? JFC kill me now because I am not worth the resources I’m draining from the world. Do my tastes now feel insufficient to describe me because I somehow know myself better? That doesn’t seem quite true either. I’m disarmed, unnerved, and deeply flattered any time someone makes a definitive claim about me to my face. When my husband says, “You have a hard time with change” when my friend says, “your son is thoughtful, like you” I feel like saying to them, you see me, too? I’m not like, Al from Quantum Leap, or [SPOILER] Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense? Every time I hug my children, I feel fresh gratitude that I don’t slide right through them like a hologram. Is this normal? Is feeling like a pixelated voyeur in your own life a character trait? Or is that just a side-effect of being a middle-aged woman? It’s not that I don’t believe I’m real. It’s just a marvel there’s anything of me to hold on to.

Reader, I choose to believe it’s a sign of maturity to realize we are unknowable even to ourselves. (At the very least, it could save me a lot of money on therapy.) Because what a person likes is always changing, and even when it’s not, the math of all those fractions of taste together will never equal a whole. There’s got to be some essence to us, right? It just evades the pin we’re always trying to stick it with. Maybe getting older is about coming to see yourself as a river, which has a name and something called a current, even when everything about it is ephemera.