BOHEMIA, AFTER THE RAIN

The heavens turned evil and the rain came in giant gallons. It fell in every direction, closely followed by hail, drenching everything in its passage. People crammed under awnings, and leapt onto buses going anywhere. Some resigned themselves to swimming in the street. And all after days of bright blue skies and sunshine. An unexpected downpour.

A storm - the prelude to a tragedy.

After the rain stopped, and the gutters were drained of the their deluge, a girl got off a bus from somewhere, and walked along the sodden grass, the muddy path of a pretty garden, towards music. To Bohemia.

'La Boheme'. The life of the Bohemian; artist, poet, musician, philosopher, lover of life... but is it all merely a drop, a bubble of romantic imagination? Pictures of this magical place drown our minds - young and creative intellectuals flooding the streets of Paris in a revolution. Puccini plays his libretto. 

One may be left wondering if Bohemia even exists - is it simply a place for the imaginative, somewhere to pose as a visionary, to live under the pretense that we are a fragment of some magical, creative movement, unspoken by the masses, but silently understood by a worthy few. ( A few million...? )

Or is it something much darker? A tragedy. Is it the place where Rodolfo arrives only at the end of Puccini's opera, when his love, Mimi, dies? Is it only then, when he is thrust into the pain of loss, the despair of heartbreak, that Rodolfo the poet finally finds the words that have betrayed him for so long? Those divine words that finally gush from his heart, like the rain teeming down from the clouds above.

And after the music has ended, and the actors have left the stage, pulling off their wigs in the wings, a girl retraces her steps, along the sodden grass, the slippery road, wondering if she deserves to live in that pied-a-terre, Bohemia... or if she still awaits her tragic ride to the avant-garde, the place of the free spirited, the unconventional - the place Puccini leads us to so beautifully, in 'La Boheme'.