An earlier version of Mary Martin levitating in black and white had so rearranged my insides, painfully and permanently, that I tyrannized the neighborhood, making everybody play Peter Pan with me. I was always Peter. A neighbor's mother asked if I would let her son be Peter once in a while. Well, if a flight over London without wings is not enough to satisfy you in and of itself, if you have to take somebody else's part, the somebody who actually invented the game, then fine.

When my father brought home the original-cast album of Peter Pan, I literally could not believe the sound. I had to be shown the record jacket. It was just too good to be true. And Peter Pan begat The King and I. The King and I begat South Pacific.

I had no idea where Broadway was. It was one of those words you hear and take for granted, never needing to imagine, because it exists inside of you. I read every word on the back covers of those original-cast albums. The mysterious and ever-present Goddard Lieberson looms large in my childhood, alongside Yertle the Turtle and Dr. Doolittle. Goddard Lieberson was a god. He was everywhere at once. The story of South Pacific didn't matter much to me. It was the songs. They could be played in any order, over and over. All those adults acting like-well, like children. I mean, spilling their guts, shouting, pretending. Mary Martin even pretended she was a boy. I mean, what was she thinking? I didn't care. To an only child, those emotions stitched together on waves and waves of more emotion, which we later learn to call melody, formed the basis of my spiritual life. And it all rhymed

To a five-year-old, no idea is too outlandish to entertain, except, of course, the idea of sex. The notion that adults stood somewhere on a stage and pretended to fly, to go to war, to wash some man right out of her hair-and all to music-was as natural as splashing in a wading pool. But I confess I did not understand what Nellie Forbush's problem was, why the reluctance to marry Emile. I had never heard of interracial marriage. Or maybe I was too close to Mary Martin to admit her faults. I don't know. In the ensuing years, when my parents and many of their friends sat in front of the TV muttering about Martin Luther King, calling him "uppity," when my grandmother insisted that the "nigras" had been treated well in the South, I began to rehear Lieutenant. Cable's words-no, Oscar Hammerstein's words-and to find a place for them. Again, my greatest comfort came from an original-cast album: "You've got to be taught before it's too late&to hate all the people your relatives hate."

At some point, twenty years down the road, I threw away all of my original-cast albums. What was I trying to get rid of? The slow-dawning embarrassment at the inappropriateness of my hobby. It may have been okay to hover outside the record store, waiting for the much heralded arrival of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, but not for Skyscraper.

What was I to do with the uncontainable glee I meant to share with my college mates and teachers after witnessing the first Boston previews of Company, Follies, and A Little Night Music? And the fan letters I sent to Stephen Sondheim? And standing at the edge of the stage of the Colonial Theatre in Boston, two years out of college, during our first dress rehearsal for Shenandoah, staring out at those murals covering the ceiling of what is surely America's most beautiful theater, seen at last from that side of the orchestra pit? And then recording the original-cast album. You can hear me, a neat half-tone flat, singing my one solo line, "A penny in a wishing well...Copper turned to rust." You can't hear me cornering Betty Comden at the first rehearsal for On the Twentieth Century, telling her how much I loved Subways Are for Sleeping when it came out. Though you may be able to imagine the peculiar mix of disgust and amusement on her face.

Oh, hell. I wanted to stay inside of those songs. I admit it. But it didn't take me long to realize that I wasn't star material. Fifteen years? Long after I had made New York my home, I still craned my neck in the cab to see what new marquees had gone up along those cross streets down Broadway in the Forties. And, finally, I found a way to be in the audience and in the show at the same time. You see, you sit down at a desk, alone with the music of whatever it is you hear ricocheting around in your head. And you disappear. Along with the time you were swimming in. You get to be the play, and then you get to let it go and let other professionals bring it to life. And you watch. And you applaud.

What Proust finally unlocked in that little bite of madeleine I find on the original-cast albums of my youth. It doesn't matter that I threw them away. I wouldn't want to listen to them, any more than I would really want to see that old lost kinescope of Mary Martin wobbling back and forth from wing to wing. In my mind, she really flies. The real Broadway may be an embittered, war-torn, litter-strewn, and lost byway of American culture.

But not really. For me, sitting in wait for the houselights to dim in any theater anywhere, or sitting in the glow of my own computer screen...the light of that charged atmosphere can never lose its true, original cast. I lift the needle and the shock hits me again. I won't let it go.

Craig Lucas wrote the book for Lincoln Center Theater's Tony Award winning musical The Light in the Piazza. His plays include Blue Window, Small Tragedy (Obie Award, Best American Play 2004) and The Singing Forest(American Theater Critics Award, Best American Play 2005). As screenwriter and/or director, his movies include The Dying Gaul, The Secret Lives of Dentists, Longtime Companion, and Birds of America, starring Matthew Perry, Ben Foster, Ginnifer Goodwin, Hilary Swank, and Lauren Graham.

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