I was in love with Kevin Wright before I'd actually seen him or heard his voice. I was 12, almost 13.

My best friend's name was Christine and she was about as weird as I was, give or take a musical or two. (I always liked Sondheim. She was more of a Frank Wildhorn/Andrew Lloyd Webber kind of girl.) We were obsessed with the theatre. We wanted to be actresses. We wanted to move to New York. We got tickets to everything that came into the Wang, the Schubert, the Colonial. Every musical. We had better showtunes collections than your local Sam Goody and we crushed, long, hard and teenaged-girl crazy, on the boys in those shows.

The dire, instinctual need to squeal at pretty boys, whether they're belting out Soliloquy or Quit Playin' Games With My Heart, is universal if you're 13 and a girl. Back then, there were no Backstreet Boys. Grunge was boring, dirty, atonal, and not nearly escapist enough for us. We turned to the stage. At one point, we even had a running Theater Boy Boyfriend List. Kevin Gray. Jarrod Emick. John Cameron Mitchell. Romain Fruge. Anthony Warlow. Anyone who had ever played Marius got automatic entry, as did most Enjolrases and Dickons and Chrises. Anyone who had a willowy Les Miz tenor. Anyone who had ever sung Why God, Why? for any reason, on any stage, anywhere in the world.

Then Christine did this horrible thing to me. She saw Jesus Christ Superstar without me. I think I was busy, or I didn't have the money. (It was babysitting money back then, remember.) But I didn't go.

She called me the next day crying.

"Laura, I have seen the most beautiful boy I have ever seen. He has the most beautiful voice ever. He has the most beautiful face ever. I love him."

He played Peter. The Young One. (We perpetually fell in love with The Young One. In fact, being The Young One would often gain an actor entry into the Theater Boy Boyfriend List all by itself.) She talked about him constantly. She Xeroxed his picture in the program and gave it to me with pen scrawl all around his face. Little arrows pointing, with the words "Doesn't he have the best hair??!" written along the side.

I was jealous. I wanted to share Peter. She made me go out and buy the new cast album, the London version, because the young British actor playing Peter "sounded a lot like" her Peter. I bought facsimile Peter. I stared at the Xeroxed picture. I fell vicariously in love.

Fast-forward a few years, through the theater obsession, into college, away from Christine, into some semblance of adulthood, into randomly discovering a group called Rockapella and falling drop-dead in love with them on first listen.

I was in bed with my headphones on, listening to 2, thinking about the personalities behind the voices for the first time. Three I knew from Carmen Sandiego, pillar of my childhood, completely familiar in that amazing I-feel-eleven-again way. Jeff Thacher. Berklee grad. Quasi-Bostonian. Kevin Wright. Background in theatre.

Background in theatre.

The I realized: If he did theater back when I loved the theater, and he did, I would have known who he was. Because Christine and I knew who everyone was, everyone in every chorus. The more obscure the better.

I started thinking about his voice, about that ache in his upper register, about how he looked. About his curly hair. About that picture, 2X21/2 inches, on a Xeroxed sheet of legal-sized paper lying crumpled in a box somewhere in my closet at home. That picture that had a name under it. About the fact that Kevin Wright's online bio randomly mentions that he was in Superstar.

Superstar. Kevin Wright was in Superstar. Kevin Wright was, and presumably still is, Peter.

Kevin Wright who I never actually got to hear sing What's the Buzz because I spent my money on CDs instead. Kevin Wright who I loved in the abstract when I was 13 years old. Kevin Wright, who until that moment, was frozen for me in 1993, 25ish and skinny and a young actor who I thought had faded out of site, because most of those actors do.

I wanted to cry. I wanted to run around the room. I wanted to call Christine, who I haven't talked to in years. I lived with facsimile Kevin Wright for almost eight years. Then the real one fell in my lap. Or collided in the air above my head along with ten or twelve other unidentified flying childhood memories.

Maybe it was the weirdness of it all that affected me. Maybe it was some kind of juvenile vindication, a See, I knew he was good WAY BACK THEN kind of thing. Maybe it was because I realized that no matter how much we change, we really don't. Or maybe it was for one simple reason: After all these years, I finally got to hear him sing.

And sing, he does. Christine was right. He was worthy of wasting dimes to Xerox and crying over the phone. It's still there. He's a little older, maybe. A little altered by time and circumstance, probably. But then again, aren't we all?

1. The Jesus Christ Superstar Days. Aw how cute. Kevin Wright as a sapling. This is a scan of the very Xerox copy that started all of this nonsense in the first place. Note Christine's eloquent 13-year-old commentary scrawled around the picture in Bic.
2. Bring in the Morning. Taken from Theatre World Volume 50, 1993-1994, of Kevin and company in a show called Bring in the Morning where he played a character named, I kid you not, Nelson. Which one's Kevin, you ask? Go for process of elimination and call me when you get there.