This weekend I finally had the time to watch Rent, and, like many before me, fell in love with the song “La Vie Bohème” and its championing of all things alternative. My father worked in Alphabet City as a carpenter in the mid-’80s, where Rent supposedly took place, but he took la vie bohème on a slightly different, more rural route. He tells me how every weekend he took the train to upstate New York and worked on building a backwoods cabin—“The Cabin”—on our family’s acreage.
