Fun, Love, and Inspiration  August 1st

A summer ago, I discovered the fan-made musical A Very Potter Musical, produced by the theatre troupe from the University of Michigan who call themselves Team Starkid. As a Harry Potter fan, I absolutely loved it, and re-watching any and all of it never fails to make me laugh. The songs are brilliant, and everyone in the group is so talented. It is so impressive to me that they could write and perform a full-length musical, and it seems like everyone had a great time doing it. Naturally, when they launched A Very Potter Sequel on July 22, I was thrilled.

I love these kids so much because they are so fun to watch, and all of their work I have seen (check out their original musical, Me and My Dick) has satisfied or surpassed my expectations. I downloaded the free soundtracks to the Potter shows as well as the A Very Starkid Album and MAMD albums from iTunes. I’ve followed many of the actors on Twitter, set this as my desktop wallpaper, and I totally want to buy one of their shirts. Perhaps I am moderately obsessed. But it makes me so happy to watch people do something they love, have fun, and be successful at the same time!

All of this Starkid fangirling on my part reminds me of what has kind of been a sporadic running joke in my life for a while. During my first year in high school, my best guy friend randomly said to me once in history class, “Wouldn’t it be great if life was a musical?” I had thought I was the only one who thought that, that it would be kind of totally awesome if people could break into song and start dancing in sync when anything important or even mundane happened. Since then, I’ve probably joked at least once during each new academic obsession that I should write a musical for it. Back then, it was Honors Biology: The Musical. (We also thought there should be Punnett Square: The Movie.) Most recently, the production I have not written is Physical Chemistry: The Musical, which I casually suggested to my friend Eilish in January or February.

Let me tell you, if we ever wrote a whole musical about chemistry—hell, even if it was never even performed—that would be the best day of my undergraduate career. Yeah, even better than graduation, the day we can say, “Yeeeaaahhh, we did all dis BS for dis B.S. in chemistry!” (No, after a college education we won’t say “this” properly, I guess.) One day, guys, you will see a [script of] a chemistry musical from me, and I will be immensely proud because that’s something I want to see happen.