How did I get Hamilton tickets?
That's everyone's first question. (Always with quite textual subtext. I get it.) 

I spent hours coordinating dates for my family (why do the kids have to grow up and take summer internships when I want to go to Broadway?), and more hours on sites that reviewed various seats at the Richard Rodgers Theatre and, most of all, hours on the ticketing site looking for non-resale seats that dovetailed all those things into 3 seats together in the middle of row L and 1 seat way up front. (Getting 4 together was a non-starter.)
I bought them in early November for the end of June show. 

Life intervened, despite all of my planning, and my husband needed to be in Ireland with his mum during June, so my Hamilton-loving niece joined us for summer in the city. 

Was it amazing?
Completely. For the first half, I sat in the front row (note: not the actual front row, but the first of the rows they sell tickets for - i.e., the second row) and I turned into a bolt of pure lightness and electricity the moment Leslie Odom, Jr. came out, stood like eight feet from me, and began singing.
​("Singing" seems like the weakest of words to describe his performance.)

Also, Lin-Manuel Miranda kept making eye contact with me.
WITH ME! It was intense. And delightful. And giddy-making.
I know, probably I was imagining it. BUT, a friend of my kid's and his family were sitting two rows behind me, and they said I wasn't. 
Also (I maybe mention this a lot), he retweeted me after the show and said that my son (who sat in the up front seat for the second half) and I were awesome. Excuse me, "so awesome." 
(Chills, people.)

The view from Row L was also amazing. The whole stage was a glittering kaleidoscope of power and motion and light and such gorgeous, gorgeous sound.
​
My niece didn't leave her seat at intermission or after the show until she'd finished journaling. Meanwhile,  my younger son - the one who split the front row with me - waited at the pit and got a signature on his songbook from Alex Lacamoire. (Both sons were Hamilfans, but the younger, who is a budding composer, was the greater, so the seat split went to him.) The four of us floated out of the theatre and into the Greatest City in the World.

At any rate, to celebrate that amazing night, and also because it's very much in line with everything I want the world be, I donated today to Lin-Manuel Miranda's latest Prizeo campaign (benefitting the Immigrants: We Get the Job Done Coalition), and made an embarrassingly inept speech as I screened an adaption of the Hamilton song "Dear Theodosia" the sons performed for my Mother's Day gift last year. 

​You should donate!

I've been road tripping, and remembering how I love these long, long stretches of driving time.
I know, right?
Home to college was a 2000 mile trek, and I had it all planned out. Get up early on day 1 so I could end the day just over the Texas border, in Las Cruces, NM. I had a favorite truck stop there. I loved having a favorite truck stop in Las Cruces. Day 2 meant a few brief hours watching the changing landscape and skyscape of the New Mexican desert. When I was lucky (so: if it was summer), there would be lightning storms traveling long distances as I watched. Day 2 ended somewhere in Arizona, and I had to get up early enough to skirt most of LA before traffic there got bad. The rest of Day 3 was several hours on I-5, past farms and more farms and stockyards and farms, then a quick jig over towards the coast and campus.

This trip began with those I-5 hours, and it was very much a "the more things change" situation. The billboards about water rights were focused on almonds instead of grapes, all these years later, but the streams of trucks in the right lanes, hopscotching cars in the left lanes, were just the same. I was as tickled now by the signs showing almost equal mileage to San Francisco and Sacramento as I was back then.
We had audiobooks and podcasts and music to stream on our phones instead of my collection of mix tapes (thanks, all you ex-boyfriends for the mix tapes!). We had GPS instead of AAA maps. We had a hybrid so our stops were dictated by human more often than automotive needs. But we had "road buddies" - those cars you're always passing or who are always passing you, depending on who stopped for how long. We had the sun slanting in at bad angles through the windshield. We had drive-throughs and tailgaters and speed traps and the road. The long, unfurling road, and the way time stretches into a matter of miles rather than minutes. A pit stop in 36 miles. Gas in 80. 216 more before we stop for the night, and 700 to go when we arise the next day.

i told my son, as we rolled north on 5, about my interstate college commutes, but my love of the road trip began much earlier. When we were young, my parents would load the 4 of us kids and a cooler of peanut butter and grape jam into the station wagon or Suburban and head out for a few summer weeks. The big trips were all around the eastern states one year, then the western states two summers later. We saw so many Capitol Buildings and monuments and Holiday Inns. I cried at mountains (still not great with heights, though I admire them from afar.) I gaped at redwoods. I won my share of games of Murder in the Dark, and "guess when we've gone a mile" and the License Plate game. (I know now it was my share. Back then I thought 1/2 was reasonable, not 1/4.) Mom took the whole time off to drive us, but Dad returned to Houston to work for part of these trips. You better believe she fielded a high number of "it's just you and these four kids for HOW LONG?" comments.
So when I set out to drive a few hundred or a couple thousand miles, I'm undaunted. I grew up with a great road map.
​Mom: better than AAA and GPS combined.