It's always, "Lagusta, when will chocolates be restocked?" and never, "Lagusta, what are your thoughts on Cats: Jellicle Ball?"
My mom was a theater critic in the 90s so I've seen "Cats" probably a dozen times. Every word is burned into my brain. My childhood cat was Mister Mistoffeeles. My mom died ten years ago but I knew I had to see Cats: Jellicle Ball -- I knew I'd miss hearing the songs with my mom I but was too curious about this queer ballroom + "Cats" mashup. I knew my Paris is Burning, I knew my Drag Race, I knew Pose, I figured I was prepared. But the second I heard the opening chords I started crying. I went with my step-daughter who had watched a few RuPaul episodes with me but knew almost nothing about "Cats" and a friend who also knew all the songs. We were ready for a treat night. I wasn't ready to be plunged into intense awe and even more intense mom-grief. Later, in the non-stop texts about the show my friend and I exchanged trying to process what we had just seen and how breathless it left us, I told her that I had had the thought during the show that T.S. Eliot would have loved it. (I'd been pregaming by reading my mom's copy of Practical Cats). She said, "he was writing about a community that had not yet come into being." EXACTLY. It's not just that this mashup worked — that the winks, deep cut wordplay, endless death drops and duckwalks and every single performance all landed so flawlessly. It's that THIS IS WHAT CATS HAS ALWAYS BEEN ABOUT? This is the finest form of this piece of culture, and I can't stop thinking about it. I love this line from the NYT review of the show: "The emphasis here is certainly on a body’s capacity for self-fashioning beauty." Yes. But so, so, so much more. Resistance, self-actualization (picking your own name to honor your deepest self), true community (on a lot of levels, but taking this very English show and transforming it into a truly New York production with MetroCards and Spanish translations was so beautiful), movement. Grief. Love. When Grizabella sang Memory I grabbed my friend's hand and squeezed and thought of my mom and let myself cry until I was wrung out. Then I clapped for a hundred million years, am still clapping. Chocolates will be restocked 5/12.
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