once again i'm not sure this is the right place for this but here we are

[horselizard]

i'm... crying

i'm actually sitting at my desk literally crying

i was just innocently reading an article about the etymologies of tube station names and suddenly... this

LET ME EXPLAIN that ever since 2002 tottenham court road tube station has held a mythical status for me, because it is the tube at which you alight if you are going to the dominion theatre, which from the early 00s until actually quite recently was the home of the queen musical "we will rock you"

i went on a life-changing pilgrimage to see that show aged 14, day-tripping 3+ hours on the train each way from my hometown - we hardly ever visited london, it was too far - maybe that was even the first time i ever went on the tube?! - and my anticipatory thrill when we finally pulled in to the tube station was echoed in a brilliant bit of staging halfway through where the characters suddenly descend into a disused dystopian-future version of that very same station, complete with roundel

i lapped that show the fuck up aged 14, old enough to have seen documentaries about "sex changes" and declared that i "thought i was transsexual", but born too early to think i could do anything about it other than live as a girl until i reached majority and then go directly to male; i lapped it all up, including its hackneyed "i'm not like the other girls/boys" theme of two outsiders from an apparently very binarist, segregated and narrowly-stereotyped teen gender culture finding solace in Being Outsiders Together

i...

fuck...

...can you imagine lil baby-tran me rocking up at tcr with my parents and THAT. BEING. RIGHT. THERE.

...can you imagine the heroes of the musical descending into the tube station and THAT. BEING. ON. STAGE.

(for reference: that photo is presumably from early/mid 2018, from the film poster, and wwry closed at the dominion in 2014, so we can't know if they'd have had the guts to do that, and tbh it maybe wouldn't have given the right vibe what with the whole dystopian-future thing, BUT Y'KNOW)

okay, the present day is still a pretty shitty time to be a tran, but... GOD... SO MUCH has changed in 20 years...

...and now i'm crying again <3

Comments

[kaberett]

Yep. I had some... Very Similar Feelings about going through Hammersmith station and spotting the roundel still there, recently. Minus the musical, obviously, but -- good grief, just, the amount I cried at the theatre kid on stage in the Old Vic singing Ring of Keys. How far we've come since I was that age.

[horselizard]

i did not know (of) that song before and i just looked it up and ! <3

[spidrak]

I can imagine, and it is making me smile. Also wishing that it could have *actually* been there for 14-year-old you.

[horselizard]

<3