The Breakfast Sandwich

28 years ago today I got to interview Rosa Parks about that day on the bus. It was about 4 o’clock at a diner in Hoboken New Jersey and to ease into the interview I asked her what she ate for breakfast that morning, and she said “a ham and cheese sandwich young man – that’s what I ate.” Maybe she misheard the question. Six months later a newspaper in New Jersey published that story and gave me a pair of tickets to sit in the 5th row to see Rent on Broadway. A pair of great seats for a a once-in-a-lifetime interview with a woman known for her seat in history books. For a small-town reporter, that day was life changing - the show came at a time when some of my friends were living with HIV and facing a world that didn’t understand them, nor their disease. I was probably one of them. Some of them passed on including “Mick” who helped me develop the black and white film from my old Nikon camera for news photos. Now, nearly 3 decades later, I remember them for the grace and courage they showed. People can live longer with HIV thanks to treatment and early diagnosis and the impact of shows like Jonathan Larson’s Rent. We took the family to Rent in 2021 and it struck me how the show just doesn’t have the same meaning or impact for our kids. They can’t appreciate those times much less the disease - much like they couldn’t understand why their Black classmates would ever have to sit anywhere on the bus but right next to them. They do have their own cultural crises to deal with now, their own epidemics, and their own music for their own time. But there is one song from Rent that probably does transcend. 525,600 minutes – it opens the second act with the cast of 15 moving in unison to the front of the stage. “How do you measure a year,” they sang out. How do you measure this year and how will you measure the next one? Many of us measure it in second dates and second chances, others in days sober or days without pain, or the number of times we feel welcome, unisolated by what a sign says because of how we look or identify or how a school or doctor labels us. And some of us, like the great Rosa Parks, well maybe we measure it in how many times we get to have a good breakfast sandwich. I think about that day in the diner and how just a year earlier I got to introduce Rosa Parks at commencement and I think about what influences our behavior, and if we measure our time in how often we stand up or how often we sit down…