Zack’s birthday was last week and he wanted to go see a movie.
He wanted to see the Green Inferno.
I admit, when he told me what the movie was about, I laughed pretty hard. It wasn’t till the carnage began that I remembered I don’t enjoy horror movies.
The Green Inferno is about a group of starry eyed college kids who fly to the Amazon to rescue a village from developers. Their plane goes down and every one of them is eaten by cannibals. It’s not as funny as it sounds.
When your adult kids want to do things with you, you just say “YES”, you don’t quibble.
If you like that sort of thing, I will say the movie had excellent production values, a more complicated plot than simple bloodshed and the acting was fine, considering there were no recognizable faces in the cast. The cannibals were amazing. The special effects were way too good for my peace of mind.
I will admit, my one thought when it ended was that we’d missed lunch and I was hungry.
Midweek, we headed south to have dinner with Ty, Megan and the kids and on the highway I got a call from my sister Katie, who had an extra ticket to see Sweeney Todd downtown. She wondered if I’d like to come along.
I had to decline since I was on my way to see the grandkids. Plus, I think I’d had my fill of cannibalism as entertainment for the week.
Katelyn and Chad were in town over the weekend, so Grandma Punkin had a big dinner for everyone. There’s nothing we all like better than seeing the whole crowd together, even though it’s chaotic, cacophonous and crazy. It’s no surprise that we all grew up with the ability to carry on four conversations at once.
That’s where my daughter Katie told me about her latest obsession; Hamilton.
She had been listening to the soundtrack of the musical for the last few days and was blown away. She couldn’t get enough of it and wanted to read the biography by Ron Chernow that had inspired the show.
Zack downloaded the music and was as impressed by it as Katie. He put it on my Ipod and Saturday, I listened to it while I worked.
I haven’t got the words to describe how much I love it.
But I can tell you why I love it.
First of all, it’s entertaining. The music is contemporary, hip hop, accessible and catchy. The lyrics are a revelation. I’m sure I’m not the first to say that this is a masterpiece, proving the genius of the author, Lin-Manuel Miranda.
It’s the story of the American Revolution and the founding of the United States told through the life of the quintessential American, Alexander Hamilton.
Right now, all most of us know about Hamilton is that there’s a movement afoot to remove him from the ten dollar bill. This would be not only a mistake but an affront to our history.
Hamilton was the bastard son of a whore, born on an Island in the Caribbean. She died when he was very young, leaving Alex to fend for himself, which he wasted no time at all doing. He knew he was smart, he worked his ass off getting educated and recognizing the Revolution to be the best way for a penniless nobody to get ahead, became General Washington’s right hand man by his early twenties.
The first act is about Hamilton’s early life, education and service during the war, the second act about the difficult job of building a nation once independence had been won.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, King George III, Lafayette, John Adams and James Madison all make appearances, along with other historical figures I was unaware of but wish I’d known before.
Hercules Mulligan was the first American spy. He was a haberdasher who made uniforms for the British officers. He listened as he took fittings and brought the information to the army. We should all know his name.
The Schuyler sisters, one of whom married Hamilton, all of whom loved him, are well represented.
The color blind casting brings home the fact that the story of the American founding is for everyone, not just ‘old white men’.
The story emphasizes the point that our Founding Fathers were not Angels sent from Heaven or gods of some sort; they were ordinary men, with all their faults, shortcomings and vices. They were occasionally petty, disagreeable, dishonorable, profligate, weak, promiscuous, loudmouthed, indecisive…Hey! They were just like us!
And yet they managed to win a war against the world’s sole superpower and build the greatest nation the world had ever seen out of the wilderness. What did they have that we seem to have lost? Confidence in themselves and the society they wished to create.
Right now in Minneapolis, there’s a movement afoot to rename Lake Calhoun. Apparently some folks around here have such well-ordered lives that they have nothing else to worry about than whether or not a guy for whom we named a lake over a hundred years ago was a supporter of civil rights as we now recognize them. For the record, he wasn’t. He supported slavery. To which I can only ask the politically incorrect question “So what?”
Lots of people did lots of stupid things for lots of different reasons back in the day…just like now.
I’m opposed to rewriting or erasing our history, trying to pretend that only the perfect can possibly be great. If that’s our standard for naming lakes, cities, counties, or states then we may as well just rename everything “Jesus”. Lake Jesus, Jesus river, Jesustown, Jesusville, Jesusopolis….or we can accept the reality that everyone (else) who ever lived is capable of being a terrible person on any given day or holding opinions that someday may be considered beyond the pale.
Alexander Hamilton was a brilliant man and for the record, an abolitionist from the beginning. Even those who couldn’t stand him (T. Jefferson, for instance) conceded that his works were that of genius. Without him, Washington may not have been able to win the Revolution. Without him, the fledgling nation may never have stood. Without him, the Constitution may never have been ratified and national debt may have sunk the nation before it ever drew breath.
He was also an obnoxious know it all who wouldn’t shut up, couldn’t back down from even a stupid fight, made enemies constantly, was robustly opinionated and humiliated his wife and himself over his infidelity.
Nobody’s perfect.
I hope this show is the biggest hit on Broadway since Annie in the mid-seventies. It could be just the thing to awaken national pride in the younger generations who haven’t been taught such. It could be the antidote to the anti-founding sentiment in academia these days. If a person with a beginning as inauspicious as Alexander Hamilton can rise to the top by virtue of hard work, intelligence and talent, then there’s no excuse for any of us to sit on our asses complaining about the bad hand we’ve been dealt.
Hamilton is not merely a rousing, toe tapping, sing along good time of a show; it’s a lesson in why we can and should be proud of our country.
o edit.