Why I love If/Then.

WHY I LOVE IF/THEN. 

As many of you know, I'm going through this Idina Menzel / If/Then obsession.  

What if? What if?
What if you wonder?
What if? What if?

One of life's biggest questions.  

I recently read a disturbing article about a child of 8 years old that lost his life because he played with dolls.  The little angel's mother and her monster boyfriend tourtured and ultimately killed the child.    I don't know if there is more to this story, but I wish for a not very pleasant life for the mother and her boyfriend.  When I was a kid, I was obsessed with The Wizard of Oz and I played with all the OZ dolls, figurines, and even dressed up as the wicked witch several times for Halloween.  Unlike this unforuntate 8 year old, I was allowed to be myself, and I was allowed to develop my own personality and become the person that I'm shaping up to be today.  I wonder though, what if I wasn't allowed to play with dolls?  What if I played with dump trucks and wrestling?  

See each choice you make as kind of a loss.
Each turn that you take
and each coin that you toss.
You lose all the choices
you don't get to make.
You wonder about
all the turns you don't take.

Don't think for a second that I spend TOO much time thinking about all of the "What Ifs" and the turns I didn't take because the past is something that I will not dwell on...

I'm never going back...that past is in the past. 

Whoops.  Wrong show.  My bad.  

It's interesting though - the choices we make and the paths we take, and the "how would things have been different had THIS happened instead" are all interesting subjects to tackle and to think about.  This is why I think If/Then is groundbreaking. It's fresh, it's forward thinking and I LOVE it! I love that it opens the eyes and minds of audience members and makes them feel something.  

The multi-layered characters and their relationships intrigue me and they move me each time.  It doesn't matter who - whether Lucas and David, or Kate and Anne, or Elizabeth and Josh - they are all meaningful and played with such depth and realness.  

We've made amazing progress with marriage equality and "being gay" is not as taboo is it was maybe 20 years or so ago and I love that If/Then introduces us to gay and lesbian relationships.  I'm sure many of the audience members are husbands or fathers there to see Idina with their wives or daughters and it's a good feeling to know, that that straight father, or that conservative family man is being shows that two men wanting a child is normal.  Or two women having marital problems, just as straight couples do, is normal.  It is indeed the new normal.  

The story follows Elizabeth after she leaves her life and her ex husband back west to "start her life new" and it shows us the story of two different paths that all start with simple choices, that are often hard to make.  One of the lines that I love, that I so relate to is passionately sung out by Idina in You Learn to Live Without:

You learn to hold your life inside you and lever let it out.  

I'm writing this blog, and deciding to share stories with you because...I don't want to hold my life inside me.  And I feel like I am holding more and more in. So blogger and all of you are my new therapists!  

So thanks to Brian Yorkey for your beautiful, inspiring words and thank you Tom Kitt for your amazing, touching, heartfelt music.  

And thank you mom for allowing me to be me and for supporting my love of music and theater and for just being effing amazing. 

Ok, now go listen to IF/THEN.