The second I met Gabi Karl, I knew her.

Thirty years ago, her name was Eric, a sophomore in a class I was teaching on the side from my real-life newspaper job. On the second straight day Eric missed class, I didn’t follow the school protocol. If there was any protocol, I didn’t know what it was, because I wasn’t a certified teacher. I was a gap-filler for a private Denver high school that needed someone – anyone – to step in and teach an Intro to Theater class so the school could keep its accreditation.

Eric’s best friend was in my class, too. He told me no one had seen Eric since he went to his dealer’s apartment five nights before. I asked if he knew the address. He did.

Class dismissed. Best friend and I were going on a field trip.

I knocked on the front door, saw Eric asleep on the couch and pulled him out. There was no danger or drama about it. Just a human grab-and-go. The three of us spent the next four hours at an Azar’s Big Boy eating cheeseburgers and talking about how things at home got this way.

I don’t know how many rules I broke that day. And I don’t much care. Eric was safe, and fed. A few weeks later, I put him in a play I was directing at the school: “Don’t Drink the Water,” by Woody Allen. It gave him a purpose and a direction for a couple of months. Today I am told Eric – which is not his real name – is a big deal in the motorsports industry. Doing just fine. Kids often are, if we can just get them through the fraught high-school years alive.

I’ve been saying that theater saves lives for so long now that it sounds like a slogan. It’s not a slogan for Gabi Karl, who on May 17 earned the highest accomplishment for a Colorado high-school thespian: She was named the Bobby G Awards’ Outstanding Lead Performer for playing Janis in ThunderRidge High School’s “Mean Girls.” Joining her was Caleb Kezeor, who was honored for playing Quasimodo in Woodland Park High School’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” The cheering was so loud inside the Buell Theatre that neither heard their names called. Together, they will advance to represent Colorado in the national Jimmy Awards on June 24 in New York City.

And just a few weeks ago, Gabi was experiencing homelessness.

She left home because of what she calls overwhelming mental abuse from her mother, a strict woman who grew up in a traditional Asian household in Indonesia. She rode her daughter hard, Gabi said. Always pushing. Always degrading. Nothing she did was ever good enough. “She would constantly threaten me,” said Gabi, who said she was diagnosed with clinical depression and anxiety disorder going into high school. Her mother did not understand or support the diagnosis. She never could reconcile Gabi’s struggles with the privileges and opportunities she was being afforded, like their house in Highlands Ranch.

“She didn’t understand how I could have things and still be depressed,” Gabi said. The claustrophobia of the COVID shutdown only exacerbated the rift.

“It took a really serious mental toll,” said Gabi, who finally ran away and was eventually taken in by her partner’s family. And by her teachers at ThunderRidge. And by her classmates and their mothers – a support group she calls her “aunties.”

Gabi’s mother did not see her award-winning performance in “Mean Girls.”

On Tuesday, I met with Gabi and Caleb at the Denver Center to revisit one of the greatest nights of their young lives. I asked Gabi straight-out where she would likely be on this very day if she had never found safe haven in the ThunderRidge High School theater program.

“This is going to sound kind of dark,” she said, “but I don’t know if I’d be alive.”

A tale of two mothers

These are hard words for Caleb Kezeor to hear and fully process, what with Gabi on his left and his own adoring mother seated silently to his right. Kelly Kezeor actively encourages and even participates in her children’s’ school interests. Kelly was nominated herself for a Bobby G Award as part of the team that designed the “Hunchback” set for Woodland Park High School.

“Well, I just have to be flat-out honest and say – I’ve had it pretty easy,” Caleb said. “I have nothing even close to Gabi’s story at all.”

Which is the whole point. About how arts programs in schools afford kids whose only commonality might be that they are often on the fringes – polar though those fringes might be – with the opportunity to take center stage and shine. Like these two completely different winners who already seem bonded for life.

“Your stories sort of complete each other,” I told the two, which prompted smiles and an affirmative high-five between them.

“Theater has really forged my path since the fifth grade, and I already know this is what I want to do for the rest of my life,” said Caleb, who has received nothing but encouragement from his parents along the way.

“Both Caleb and his sister are amazing at what they do, and they love every second of being on the stage,” Kelly told me.

Woodland Park is a tiny little town of not even 8,000 nestled 20 miles northwest of Colorado Springs at the base of Pikes Peak. Caleb just graduated in a class of about 120. “There’s not a lot to do in Woodland Park,” he said. “But the theater program is one of the strongest communities in the whole school, and I’m just very proud to call it my home.”

On the day the Bobby G Awards nominations were announced, the four-part harmonious Kezeor family – Kelly, Joe, Caleb and Abby – gathered behind mom at the computer to look at the list together.

“It was 4 o’clock on a Thursday, and my mom started scrolling right past everything to get straight to my category,” Caleb said. “She wasn’t even looking for her name.”

When she found Caleb’s, he said, “We all just kind of partied a little bit.”

And what does that look like in the Kezeor household?

“Oh, we did a little dance,” Caleb said – and then demonstrated. If only there were video.

Kelly says it never occurred to her that she, too, might be nominated, prompting Caleb to interject: “It was a killer set, mom, and you were there for five hours every day building it – of course you were going to be on that list!”

I asked Caleb what it was like for him to hear Gabi tell her diametrically different story, knowing that she has never felt the unconditional maternal support that he’s never gone a day without.

“I feel so much compassion toward Gabi because I know that my life has been nothing like hers at all,” he said. “I just want her to feel all the love in the world.”

In the fall, Caleb is heading to Oklahoma City University to study musical theater. Gabi is already enrolled at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and is majoring in psychology. But the encouraging events of the past year have emboldened her to soon add a second major to her workload – in musical theater.

The Big Apple awaits

But before college takes these two on their separate ways, there is the very large matter of the eight upcoming days in New York that are sure to blow their minds.

The Denver Center’s Bobby G Awards are one of more than 50 state or regional competitions around the country. The 15th annual Jimmy Awards, presented by the Broadway League, will gather all the Outstanding Lead Performers from each region for a week of hardcore training, master classes, auditions and bonding activities before they all take to Broadway’s Minskoff Theatre stage on June 24 to crown the national winners and dole out scholarships – something Gabi could really use right now.

“I think the thing I’m the most super-excited about is the training,” said Gabi, who only experienced her first professional vocal lesson a few weeks ago. “To get these opportunities to grow and to get an outside perspective of what you can do better is really exciting.”

And while neither Caleb nor Gabi heard their names called during the raucous Bobby G Awards party, they are quickly coming to understand what it means to them that they were.

“The world,” Caleb said. “It really made me believe that I had it – whatever ‘it’ is – inside of me, because I think every actor – every person – has self-doubt.

“I will admit that I really do want to win (at the Jimmys). But if I don’t, it’s OK. Just holding that award in Denver was enough. That told me that I have something, at least, inside of me.”

So, too, does Gabi, and her director at ThunderRidge knows that perhaps better than she does.

“Gabi is a super-kind person who’s also super-talented,” said teacher Kylene Hurley. “But what makes her special is that she perseveres. She’s gone through a lot, and she has made it out on the other side.”

The Bobby G Award is validating, Gabi confirmed. Not only that she has talent. It validates the journey, and what it took to get here.

“What this award tells me is that for anything good to happen, it takes work,” she said. “Work, work, work, work. You have to put the effort in.” And she did.

“I spent every single day of school in the theater,” she said. “That was the place that I needed to be, and that is where I felt I belonged. There were times in my life where I was so lost, and without the theater, I wouldn’t have had any direction at all. Theater was that much of a home to me. That was the family that I needed.”

It’s fitting that it was playing a mean girl like Janis that brought all that into focus. Throughout the story, Janis’ main goal is to get revenge on another girl for spreading rumors about her. Janis can be easily reduced to a character who says, “The world has hurt me. I’m going to hurt the world back.” Gabi’s story could be just as easily reduced. But that’s not how Gabi sees Janis – or herself.

“A lot of times, Janis is portrayed as really angry. But I see her more like she’s misunderstood,” Gabi said. “My thing was trying to find the balance between her anger and her loss. That in-between. Women are allowed to be angry, and we’re allowed to feel hurt and not be called mean things when we do. Men like that are called ‘the boss,’ and women like that are called the other B word. Yes, she’s angry, but that’s not all there is to her.

“I have so many things to be happy about, because  as much as I’ve gone through, I also feel very, very lucky. The big thing for me is being grateful for what I still have, and the friends I’ve made along the way.”

It’s a hopeful path that high-school theater has made itself available to thousands. To Eric. To Caleb. And now, to Gabi.