The first real album I became aware of was Billy Joel’s The Stranger. I remember listening to it in the backyard of the old house down in south Jersey. My dad owned it on 8-track, and, owing to the vagaries of 8-track, this song had to be split into two parts, so even today when I hear it I’m still somehow surprised when it fails to fade out and fade in again. Anyway: Enterprising magazine editors, I have a free idea! Sony is re-releasing the album for its 30th anniversary. That means there are thousands of couples across America who got married 30 years ago with “Just the Way You Are” as their wedding theme. Someone (obviously, we don’t have the resources and it’s not exactly a Radar story anyway, but maybe a People-type organization) should track down about 100 of these couples and see where they are today. How many of these folks, now in their fifties, are still married? How many split up? It’s the perfect package of how we saw wedded bliss back at the meandering end of the seventies and what it looks like in America now. Or not. Anyway, it’s all yours.
Oh, also? Five-year-old me thought there was a character in this song named “Brenda Renetti.” Which means that even then there were too many Italians in my life.
