The Voice

We are like two dots on a musical theatre map of the world. And every time I fall into a moment where it’s just him and me, and all the musical love hearts…I just can’t help but feel changed.

Allow me to explain.

For so many of my girl hours, I lay like a starfish on my Nan and Pop’s shagpile carpet, blissing out under giant headphones that came to feel more like home to me than the daggy relic they really were. Even after twenty or so years, I can feel the softness of the black leather on my ears (and isn’t that so completely amazing?)

Anyway. The girl. The music. I listened to whatever C.D I could find behind the glass doors of that triple decker sound system. It was like I’d come to crave music, as though every day it called to me, promised me that sunshiny feeling that only music can bring. And of course, I said: Yes. Let’s do this.

Every time I laid myself down in front of that sound system it seemed like the universe was whispering to me, like it was answering all the questions my young girl heart had not yet thought to ask of it. And actually, when music was happening to me there was no need to ask anything. In fact, there was no need to even think.

So, I didn’t think. I just listened and I felt.

One album in particular stirred up my inner butterflies, scattering them off to every corner of the room and back again, without fail. That album was: The original 1985 London Cast recording of Les Miserable. To this day, that album—and that show— takes my breath away.

And now we return to the reason for this post. The man. The voice. The moment that speeds up my butterflies and connects me to another human in a way that is so profound it has me shaking my head in wonderment whenever I think of it.

Because the thing is, this. There is a voice on that album—the voice of a man, who has such a minor part in the show I don’t even know how I found him. I don’t know his name, he doesn’t know mine. I don’t know his smile, he doesn’t know mine. All I know is that for two bars of the song ‘Red and Black’, a man sings. And I close my eyes. And I hold my breath.

I mean, it’s really quite amazing, don’t you think? There is a man out there—a singer and actor, whose identity remains a mystery to me—who will never know that there is a girl in this world who melts inside every single time she hears his voice.

Isn’t-that-epic? Isn’t that the stuff that makes hairs stand on end?

Life, huh. It really is all about the human connection.

Even the connections we don’t know exist.