Hamilton

File this under things I avoided when I shouldn't have. Like eating your kale.

In 1972, I went to see the film version of the Broadway musical 1776. I had been eagerly awaiting its debut with the nation’s bi-centennial looming. I recollect emerging from the air-conditioned comfort of the theater having thoroughly enjoyed 1776 because of its honest and ribald portrayal of the Founding Fathers, the witty repartee and the catchy show tunes.

It was “relatable” history.

The musical 1776 debuted on Broadway in 1969 and became a hit show, earning the Tony Award for Best Musical. The show’s music and lyrics were written by Sherman Edwards and its book by Peter Stone. At the time it debuted, a few years before the nation’s bicentennial, it was considered refreshing in the way it depicted the Founding Fathers as real people.

The musical follows John Adams’s fight to get the Continental Congress to pass an actual Declaration of Independence. Such a document would unite the 13 American colonies and officially make clear their united stance against England. However, as the musical illustrates, Adams struggled in this fight due to his own unpopular reputation in Congress and the fact that the Conservative wing of the Congress was reluctant to cut ties with England or adopt a new government that might put their economic reliance on slavery in jeopardy.

1776 uses catchy songs and bawdy humor to paint John Adams, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and their ilk as real, flawed humans.

The other day I was talking with a friend and he was astounded I had not yet watched Hamilton on Disney+. I said I was waiting to watch it WITH someone, and he replied, that I should go ahead and watch it because I would want to watch it more than once anyway. He declared the Broadway hit was so entrancing he would just put the soundtrack of Hamilton on and go about his day - singing, humming or listening - depending on the song.

I didn’t doubt him, but I still decided to wait.

The wait was well worth it, but he was right. I will undoubtably watch it more than once.

I found it to be as good or better than advertised. The hip hop musical, which has been running on Broadway since 2015 but has only recently reached the masses, helps to make history accessible to an even wider audience range. While the musical 1776 broke barriers with how the famous figures of our past were portrayed, I doubt it’s audience extended very far beyond the usual musical audience and dweebs like me. After all, there were no streaming services back then.

Hamilton has people of color in every major role from George Washington to the Schuyler Sisters. (There was a triumvirate of Schuyler Sisters in Hamilton, but in real life there were five sisters. Alexander Hamilton married Eliza Schuyler and corresponded regularly with Angelica Schuyler which, of course, led to some speculation.) In Hamilton, Jefferson comes off as a Francophone dandy, full of himself and incautious. Aaron Burr, who wound up killing Hamilton in a duel, comes off as duplicitous, a bit haughty and remorseful. Hamilton, himself, intemperate, randy, driven and ambitious. Not to mention a prolific writer.

I kept thinking these American statesmen probably spoke to one another in the slang of their time and, clearly, viewed one another as rivals and peers who they may or may not have thought of as ‘equals’. Using hip hop in the 21st century was a stroke of genius on Lin Manuel Miranda’s part. We know they had their differences in regards to slavery and did not regard Africans as their equals. Which, of course, makes it all the more poignant to have POC carry the show.

I learned that Alexander Hamilton was an orphan and an immigrant from the Caribbean. I learned he had to politically survive a sex pecado (a sin of magnitude, a peccadillo is a ‘little sin’) by writing something called The Reynolds Pamphlet, which was not nearly as well known (for good reason) as The Federalist Papers. I learned that he, and his family, should have steered clear of duels. I learned that the location of Washington, D.C. was determined through wheeling and dealing between Hamilton, Madison and Jefferson. “No one else was in the room where it happened, the room where it happened, the room where it happened.”

But, in the end, as if often the case, it’s the woman behind the man we have to thank.

Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton outlived Alexander Hamilton by 47 years. She never remarried. Were it not for her managing and taking care of her husband’s legacy and papers, the award-winning author Ron Chernow would not have had the treasure trove of information to delve into to write his biography of Alexander Hamilton which, in turn, was the book that inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda to write “Hamilton”.

And we would all be the poorer because from what little I remember about the Federalist Papers they were not the stuff of scintillating fare.

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We have just under three months until election day in November. Please double and triple check that you are registered to vote. You can go to vote.gov to learn how to register. You also have a responsibility of ensuring your friends are registered to vote.

You also can, must, should, and will contact your local and state representatives to demand a mail-in ballot program. Go to usa.gov/elected-officials to find out how. Trump is relying on any method of voter suppression he can to get re-elected, including creating confusion by suggesting that he will delay the elections, which is the only reason why he and other republican lawmakers oppose mail-in ballots. They know that people being able to easily exercise their Constitutional right to vote is a direct threat to their tenure in office. There's no other plausible explanation.

Also, . . . . V O T E! It’s Barack Obama’s birthday.