I Wrote a Billy Joel a Fan Letter At 53. No Regrets.

Well, Maybe a Couple Regrets, But So What?

Ok, I did it. I’m a child of the 70s and 80s. I read Tiger Beat. I had an Andy Gibb poster on my wall for a while.

But a core memory for me was in the mid-70s when I was playing at my friend Shana’s house, and her older brother Barry, (who was in high school at the time and thus very, very cool), summoned our attention to his then-favorite album — Billy Joel’s “The Stranger.”

He slid it out of the cardboard sleeve and entreated us to listen carefully as he explicated the lyrics and their full import, insisting to us that this album may well be the greatest piece of music ever laid to vinyl. Attention must be paid, he warned us.

Right then and there, surrounded by the paneling-clad walls and sitting on the rust colored shag carpeting of a post-Vietnam era family game room, a Billy Joel devotee was made.

Although I was still in elementary school when Barry schooled us in this brilliance, I was enthralled by Anthony’s potential new life after saying goodbye to Sergeant O’Leary, wondering if he ever took Mama Leone’s advice. As a non-Catholic, of course I blushed at the thought of Virginia starting “much too late.” Over the course of my life I came to agree with Billy Joel himself that “Scenes from an Italian…