Money For Nothing

Eddie Money died.
Who?
I can hear you. Don't deny it. A lot of you are wondering who this fellow is. Was. A child of the seventies and eighties would tell  you that he was a pop star, a singer. He had a few hits, and if you are an habitual watcher of reality TV, the star of Real Money on AXSTV. He had announced on an episode of his show in late August that he was suffering from esophageal cancer. Another episode featured the news of a "minor heart valve" procedure. Eddie, at seventy, was kind of a mess.
Not to speak ill of the departed, necessarily, but I have maintained a beef with Mister Money for the past forty years, and I think it might be time to simply let bygones be bygones.
Except that somewhere in the dim recesses of my mind, it still burns. In the summer of 1978, Eddie Money scored his biggest hit, "Two Tickets To Paradise." In the fall of that year, high schools around the country chose this song as the theme for their Homecoming Dance. I attended one of those high schools. I was a junior at that time. So was the girl I asked to go to the dance with me. She was a cheerleader. I was in the marching band. What was I thinking? She said "Yes," probably because the year before we had both been in the marching band and at the time I felt that she found me amusing. At least that's what I took from the way she signed my sophomore yearbook.
I bought the tickets. I bought a corsage. A wrist corsage, as my older brother advised that this would keep me from having an awkward moment of pinning something anywhere near her chest. I bought dinner. I drove. We danced. A little. I took her home. On the doorstep, under the porch light, I made what could only be described as "my move." I leaned in, and she stopped me short: "I don't kiss on the first date." Which somehow made sense in the way the whole evening had spread out in front of me. I went home, dejected, but determined that there would be a second date, because that seemed like the way things worked.
There never was a second date. Other dances came and went. Other opportunities for socializing, but the chasm the divided our social strata was ever-widening. There was no going back.
And so, every now and then, the radio will play "Two Tickets To Paradise." I turn it off. Sorry, Eddie. I will miss a number of your other recordings and the story of your life. You stomped on the Terra, and you will be missed. But I won't miss that song.