Somewhere That's Green
Shared daydreams and shared nightmares.
Most people reading this probably know me personally, but if we have not met, I have to make a confession before I go any further. I’ve always been a theater kid. I started in community theater and school plays, majored in Drama in college, and began my career working in Broadway, off-Broadway, and regional theater on the production and management side. This lifelong love of mine started at a young age, thanks to my parents. I think I broke our VHS of CATS from overuse. In kindergarten, my mom would take me to the one Blockbuster in town after school and let me pick out a movie to watch that night. Almost 25 years later and I can still picture the exact location on the VHS rack where my usual pick sat waiting for me every week. I now wonder what the cashier thought when a child came through every week and rented Little Shop of Horrors.
Yep, you read that right! The 1986 movie adaptation of the stage musical starring Rick Moranis, Ellen Greene, and Steve Martin! The movie musical that is about a humble, nerdy floral shop employee who discovers a strange and unusual plant, that turns out to be not only sentient, but also bloodthirsty (literally). While most kindergarteners were introduced to the songs of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman through The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin, I was busy belting their (far less child-appropriate) “Suddenly Seymour” into my hairbrush. My predilection for show tunes and a camp aesthetic has always been strong.
All of this is to explain the excitement when I heard an announcement that the new casting of the currently running Off-Broadway production of Little Shop would star none other than one of my favorite drag queens of all time, Jinkx Monsoon. Monsoon would take on the role of Audrey, a soft and sweet fellow floral shop worker who is a dreamer and a romantic, but whose lived reality is anything but. My thumbs simply could not type quickly enough to secure my tickets.
This past weekend, a few friends and I attended the production. I have seen both the movie and the musical so often that I could probably jump from the audience and understudy any roles in an emergency. I have also had the pleasure of seeing Jinkx Monsoon perform many times, both as part of drag shows and in theatrical roles. Nothing about this experience would be anything new and surprising, per se. And yet, at one particular part of the show, I began to feel that impossible-to-ignore sting behind my eyes indicating that waterworks were imminent. This sting, I have come to learn, hits most often when experiencing something that affects me emotionally before I have processed it mentally. It is a visceral reaction, and before I knew it, I was stifling an audible sob that was fighting to escape my body.
So how in the world did a high camp musical starring my favorite drag queen and a former teen heartthrob from my childhood elicit such a reaction from me? The answer requires a bit more context. (Spoilers ahead but also… the musical is over 40 years old. I can only shield you from spoilers to a certain extent.)
For anyone unfamiliar, the first act features a dreamy ballad sung by Audrey titled "Somewhere That's Green." Within the show, Audrey sings this to depict her deepest desires and fantasies for her life. While her real life is full of abuse, low-paying jobs, and the grime of city living, her dream life is a simple, suburban life. She pictures a tract home, a chain-link fence, a perfectly manicured lawn, and rose bushes. Her dream life is frozen dinners and early bedtimes, stability and security. If you have seen the show previously, part of the pain of watching this number is knowing that her daydream will always remain just a dream.
An added layer to this production is in Monsoon’s embodiment of Audrey. Hera Hoffer, the artist behind the glitz and glam of Jinkx Monsoon, is a trans-feminine nonbinary performer. When I watch her interpretation, I can’t help but read this Audrey as trans-coded, and that interpretation 100% works within the show’s context. When reading Audrey as trans, her “Somewhere That’s Green” is so much more than a ballad about the suburban American dream. Audrey dreams of everything that has been gatekept from the queer community for generations, especially within a 1960s-era white picket development. It would be hard enough for Audrey to break enough cycles needed to achieve that dream; she would also have to find “Somewhere That’s Green” that accepts her.
This is where my own experience and my own grief are drawn to my emotional surface. As I watched this interpretation, I related to Audrey differently than I had ever before related in my 25 years with this song.
When Megan died, we had just begun planning for our own “Somewhere That’s Green.” While we loved so much about living in New York City, Megan had recently grown tired of the day-in-day-out grind of the city. The hustle energy that had invigorated her in her early 20s was starting to tire more than inspire in her late 20s. She longed for what she called “slowness,” her way of summarizing a life with space to breathe, quiet for thinking, and time to simply exist and not always be on the go. She wanted to think about having a family. While I felt like I wanted these things in the future, I was not quite as ready as she was. An anxious person through and through, change is hard for me, and I struggle to jump on board with what I can’t tangibly imagine. My experience with “slowness” was my own childhood in Kansas, and that was a life that I would not now feel comfortable returning to in adulthood as a queer couple. I had heard lore from friends growing up in the Northeastern Megalopolis that there were, in fact, suburban communities close to major metropolitan areas where we would feel safe and comfortable. But I needed to see it to believe it.
As we ramped up conversations about the next phase in our marriage, we looked at every place we traveled with fresh eyes. Could we live here? Are there people who look like us? If we had a child here, would they be the only kid with gay parents? What does Reddit say about gay-friendliness in this town? What does the extremely detailed New York Times 2020 voting map by district show? We didn’t exactly want the cookie-cutter tract home and chain-link fence, but in practice, we wanted the same things as Audrey. Safety. Stability. A place to call our own.
As I sat watching Monsoon delicately deliver this song I have listened to hundreds of times, I cried for our mutual broken dreams. We both dreamed of a life not originally intended for us, but that we would make into our own. And neither of us will ever get to have those dreams. Sure, Audrey's dream is broken because she gets eaten by a voracious, carnivorous plant, meanwhile mine will never happen because the person whom I built this dream with’s heart stopped working one night and when she left me, she took with her the shared future we worked so hard to build. I guess one way or another, death comes for all our dreams.
To not leave you on such a downer of a note, I will instead leave you with a text anecdote I recently came across. A little-known fact is that Megan knew her fair share of musical theater before I pushed my way into her life. Part of that was Glee, but part was just her own enjoyment. But Little Shop was a musical she was familiar with pre-me, and the refrain of “FEED ME, SEYMOUR” from the carnivorous plant itself, Audrey II, was a common saying in our home. Most of the time it was used as a plea when one of us was hungry but not wanting to do the cooking. But I recently came across this exchange while re-reading old texts between Megan and myself:
Megan: I just finished Beach Read! The father’s letters at the end made me sob so
Me: Oh yeah, that was a GOOD part.
Megan: My ovaries were SHAKING. BURSTING.
Me: At the letters???
Megan: Yes, like the way he was talking about being a parent. They were like FEED ME SEYMOUR. But, you know, more like GIVE ME A BABY.
Me: So does this make your ovaries a murdering plant? And the food it eats is… a baby?
Megan: Didn’t think that reference through lol. But you get the point.
No Griefy Reads this week! I spent the last two weeks finishing up some books that were unfinished on my nightstand, and seeing theater and movies! (Anyone else see Challengers this weekend???) I just picked up a couple new reads, so I should be able to share more about them next time.
Until then, tell someone you love just how much you care about them. You never know when someone needs to hear it more than you will ever realize.
All my best,
Mackenzie
Thank you Mac, always such a beautiful tribute to your and Meg’s love 💕