One, TWO, Three, FOUR

Monday night Ray and I went to see Billy Joel in concert. I should have gotten him tickets as a Christmas present when they went on sale back around December, but I didn't realize he wanted to go until all the cheap seats were sold out and the only ones left were $100 and up. And since the only time I'm going to spend $100/person on a concert is if a) it's for a really good charity, or b) a friend has made the big time, I figured he could live with the disappointment.

But when one of my roommates got his hands on $65 tickets, I jumped at the opportunity (especially since Ray actually WAS pretty disappointed I didn't get them for Christmas). So we went on Monday night and had a blast. Billy Joel did a lot of obscure stuff, which was nice to hear for a change. When he left the stage and the stadium went dark, everybody who had a phone pulled it out and turned the screen on so that there were tens of thousands of little white & blue dots all over the stadium, kind of like that cell phone commercial that's been on TV recently. I'm not surprised, but this is the first time I've actually seen cell phones being used as the new lighters. Pretty cool.

Ray was having a great time. But as he was moving to the music, I realized that he is afflicted with a terrible disease called WMRD (white man's rhythm deficiency). It is curable, but it takes years of intense physical and psychological therapy. Ray has never been treated, and although he hides it well, it's clear that he's in the late stages of the disease, which means that it will never truly go away, no matter how much therapy he undergoes.

The good news is that he is blissfully unaware of his problem. The bad news is that I, as a professional musician, was acutely aware. I'd be tapping my leg to the beat, and he would start tapping along with me, then get slightly off and slightly more off, and slightly more off until he was in a whole different tempo than Billy and me. Have you ever sat at a stop light with your turn signal on in front of someone else with their turn signal on, and noticed that the rate of your clicker was either very slightly slower or slightly faster than the guy in front of you? Every once in a while your beats will be in synch with each other for about three or four clicks, and then you get off again.

That's the way it was with Ray. I'd grab his leg and start tapping the beat on it, but he would look at me, puzzled, and move his leg even more forcefully to his own beat. I tried to show him about clapping on beats two and four, not one and three, but he had no idea what I was talking about. I mean, it's not like Billy Joel is funk; I mean, this is a white man singing white songs to other white folk. Most people with mild or moderate WMRD can grasp his rhythms. But not Ray. I fear there is no hope.