December 24th, 9pm, Eastern Standard Time

I was 18 and bored. I had been up in my room doing homework and just could not concentrate any more. After plowing my way through a few more sentences of reading I pushed my book out of the way and sat back in my desk chair. "This is boring," I said to my empty room. Grabbing my soda I left the room and walked down the hallway and thumped down the back stairwell to the first floor of my dorm. I figured that somebody had to be doing something interesting. Sadly, most of the doors were closed. It wasn't until I got to the end of the first floor that I found a few of my friends hanging out in Kathleen's room, listening to music. Veronica was sitting backwards on Kathleen's desk chair, reading a cd booklet. Bianca was crashed in the coveted Papasan chair. On the floor sprawled Jesus. Kathleen herself was perched on her bed, writing something on her calendar. She nodded hello when I walked in and then put her finger to her lips and then pointed to her stereo. It didn't take a genius to realize that everybody was listening intently to the cd that was playing. I sprawled on the floor next to Jesus (who would punch you if you called him Jeezus) and listened. It took about two seconds to get hooked into the story playing on the stereo. Kathleen was the first one in my group of friends to discover Rent. I'm still not sure how she stumbled upon it, but if she hadn't been listening to it that night I wonder when or if I would have ever caught the Rent fever. The very next day I took the bus to the mall and bought the soundtrack, and it was pretty much the only thing I listened to for the next month. I listened to it so much it is a wonder that I didn't wear the cds completely out. I turned many of my other friends on to it and when I came home for Spring Break, got my Mom hooked as well. We got so hooked that when the show toured through Portland the following year, she bought floor seats and we drove the four and a half hour drive up to the city, just to watch the show. I will tell you now, those of you who haven't seen the show yet, the music does nothing to prepare you for the ride that is the show. The stage production is so full of energy, so awe inspiring and so beautiful that you cry during the finale. It is overwhelming and to this day when I think of that first viewing, I get chills. I saw the show one other time, almost a year later, in San Francisco. I took my friend Alex and got to watch the show work it's magic on him. We didn't talk the whole way back to school, but I knew that he could now understand why I felt so strongly about Rent. Now, when I feel uninspired or a little bit lost or frustrated with how I think my life is going, I'll listen to the soundtrack and remember all of those feelings from the first listen of the music and the first time I saw the show and how warm it felt to share the love of the show with a friend. It is an all-purpose inspiration. I can sing to it when I'm mad (Take Me or Leave Me) or sad (Without You) or even, dare I say, Spunky (La Vie Boheme and La Vie Boheme B). Tonight I sent Esso to the official site, quoted a lyric and promised to play the music for him on our next long road trip. Maybe he'll get the bug too.... or maybe not. What matters most is that, for me, the show is still magic.