I met Lin Manuel Miranda

Date: 9/1/2019

I was at this arcade sort of place and I had all of these tokens to play games. I was waiting for my sister Gianna to go get a card that would let you play any game you wanted. So I was standing in front of the game when a man and his young son came up to me. The man asked me if his son could play the game first quickly, I think because they were about to leave, and I was like, of course! Then I realized that this was Lin Manuel Miranda and his son Sebastian. I said like “omg you’re Lin Manuel Miranda” and he was like “aha yeah!” And then I said “I love Bring it on the musical so much! I’ve just started getting into it but it’s one of my favorite shows you’ve written the music for!” And he was like “oh really wow? Not a lot of people talk about that one but I’m glad you liked it” and then he was like “do you want a picture?” and of course I was like “yes I’d love one” so we took a bunch of selfies but none of them were perfect because his face was always out of shot. To get better pictures, we went back to my old house in Massachusetts so my dad could take a full body pic of us (your standard fan-hugging-celebrity pic). However, my dad was busy making food including churros, so we had to wait for him to be done to take the picture. While we were waiting, Lin Manuel was sitting at my dining room table with mom and I was just standing around when I thought of something to ask LMM. I asked him about rapping, specifically about how he wrote the rap for Lafayette and the song non stop. I was like “how did you figure out what words to use and the flow and everything and also did you write it in one go? Like a free rap?” And he gave me a typed page with an answer in blue ink. It said like you have to sort of be born with the gift to let the rap sort of come to you I guess I don’t really remember most of what the letter said but it also said that I guess you don’t have that but that’s ok. Any agent won’t really take that away from you bc you don’t need it to learn a rap and do it only to write a rap. Then I finally got our picture together and he left and I was so happy.