weehah

In about 2001, someone played the soundtrack to a Thai musical for me. I loved it so much that they found my enthusiasm for it hilarious, and they gave their tape to me. (They had seen it performed a few years earlier while on a year long student exchange to Bangkok - it must have been sometime between 1997-2000. They brought the tape back as a souvinear, but they weren't as enthusiastc about it as I was.) I played that tape constantly until the ribbon eventually wore out (I left it in the car even in the heat of summer and the cold of winter, which I'm sure didn't help) and had to toss it. Unfortunately everything on it was written in Thai, and this was the pre-internet era so I didn't have access to a Thai-English dictionary (yes I probably could have ordered one from the public library intercity loan program, but I never did; I never even knew enough to realize Thai is an abugida (kinda alphabet-like) and thus I could have transliterated the title pretty easilly - I assumed it was more like Chinese with a bazillion characters).

As a result, I have never known what the the musical was called, or what the plot was, or anything besides that the music was great. Lately I've really wanted to listen to it again, and I thought maybe someone here might know it?

90s music in the US was grunge, but the musical's sound was much more like the rock of the 80s (in the US). Emotionally it hit the same beats for me as like, Bon Jovi's Living on a Prayer, or Bonnie Tyler's Holding Out for a Hero, but I know very little about music, so it is 100% possible it was a diferent genera. (I classify music more by how they make me feel than music style.)

The inside cover had a picture of a stage with a lot of purple and red spotlights and I feel like the costumes were very flashy with sequins and stuff, but I think that might be what I expected based on the music more than actually shown in the photo. It felt kinda like it was following the wild success of The Phantom of the Opera and Cats by doing a Thai rock opera, if that makes sense.

And that is the totallity of everything potentially useful I know about it. Some other probably unhelpful bits:

The music was so diverse I kinda thought it might be more like that ABBA movie Mama Mia!, where the songs existed first, and then someone strung them all together into a narrative in order to make a play.

I vaugely recall that the person who gave me the tape hadn't seen it in Bangkok, it was some other city. But perhaps it was just on the other side of the city from where they lived or something. They had been traveling around playing tourist the weekend they saw it, anyhow.

They thought it was a musical, and the songs frankly felt like it, but it is possible that it was just a rock concert designed to tell a story as an artsy hook for the music or whatever (although it has so many performers that seems less likely.)

Um, you know how Thai music is kinda gentler on the ears than US music tends to be? Like, I feel like Jeff Satur fills kinda the same sensually aggressive and transgressive role as bands like, I dunno, The Cure? Evanescence? X-Japan? , but his stuff like...has less exclaimation marks? It is softer and like... the sense of danger is coming from the side?, instead of feeling like a direct attack? Anyhow, I feel like a lot of Thai music is like that, but several of the songs in the musical I'm looking for were more direct in a way Thai music doesn't seem to be often. Which was part of why it felt Phantom-inspired to me. (Phantom kinda does something similar - it's rock made in the era of hair metal, and you can tell, but it's not ...hard? So they are both like super restrained US 80s music.)

✨🦋 Ready for the Bug Ball 🦋✨

It can also be found on Google Drive here and on Bluesky here.

What if the children go to schools unafraid of tear gas and bullets?

What if the birds come back, and the bees are healed, and every species moves from endangered, to threatened, to thriving?

What if the rainforest ADVANCES?

What if every parking lot had solar panels? What if every structure had solar panels? What if we built climbing gyms and terraced gardens in the skeletons of old coal power plants?

What if you baked your neighbor bread, and they shared their home-grown blackberries?

What if every person who needed a home, had one? What if every person who needed healing was healed?

What if every body was treasured for what it was, not what it should be?

What if every trans child's parents attended their graduation, their wedding, their new-name-day?

What if every warehouse became a closed-circle repair station? Goods flowing out, and back, and out again? What if landfills started to SHRINK?

What if the water and air were clean? What if there was enough public transit that the cars dwindled, leaving the streets safe for kids on bikes, evening deer, midnight cats and foxes?

What if we win?

The condors are back. The whales are saved. The sea turtles are no longer endangered. The cranes are back. The bees are recovering. The air in LA and Tokyo and London is clean again. The aquifers in the LA Basin are refilling.

Children are kinder than previous generations. Parents are stopping the abuse cycle. Being trans and queer is more acceptable than ever on a ground level.

It's hard to see if you're young, if you don't know how to step back from social media and the news. But remember--bad news sells, and the algorithm knows despair keeps you scrolling. It's a skewed lens.

We are fighting and we are winning against this adminstration's bullying. We are coming together against the bullies and they are running away scared because they don't understand that we will do that.

People are working hard every day to find ways to make sure fewer animals get hit by cars and planes and rockets.

Maker spaces are more common than ever. Solar and wind are more common than ever. Coal plants are shutting down every day.

Unprecedented numbers of acres are being bought back or given back to their rightful stewards, and the world heals because of it. People are working hard every day to learn how to help a forest recover faster.

We are not at zero. We are at decades of effort to heal the world. We've come SO far.

In 1982 there were only 22 California Condors left in the world. In 1992, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), with its public and private partners, began reintroducing captive-bred condors to the wild. In 2001 the first wild nesting occurred in Grand Canyon National Park since re-introduction. In 2002 there were only 8 pairs of wild nesting birds population-wide. In 2008, for the first time since the program began, more California condors were flying free in the wild than in captivity. Today there are nearly 500 – more than half of them flying free in Arizona, Utah, California, and Baja Mexico.

When I was born, there were no condors in the wild. I'm 37 now, and there are over 250 condors flying free.

When my mom was born in 1955, there were days when she wasn't allowed to go outside to play, because of the air pollution. When I was born, that never happened anymore.

When I was born, humpback whales were critically endangered, and people thought they were going to go extinct. Today, they've recovered to exceed their recorded numbers. Other whales too!

We fixed it.

Since 1990 extreme poverty has decreased worldwide by over HALF.

- Tells you they love you all the time

- Compliments you

- Spends money on you

- Does favors for you

- Stands up for you to other people

Of course, the outcome for the victim is still negative because they're experiencing trauma. None of that excuses abusive behavior or means that someone has to sympathize or stick around. But abusers are people. They're not subhuman. Unpersoning them or pathologizing all of their behavior with pop psych buzzwords doesn't really reflect a deeper understanding of how trauma, interpersonal relationships, and abuse works, and I think we need to have better discussions about it.