Styx and Poems

I envied my brother Jeff for several years. When we were in high school, our favorite band, Styx, came to town. Of course we stood in line to get the tickets and they were pretty good, either row 13 or 14. Not as good as a front row seat but it was close enough to really see the band band and feel like you were part of the show. The problem wasn’t where we were sitting, it was what happened after the show. My brother ran into some friends from school and somehow they had been given backstage passes for after the show. They had one extra and my brother got it.

I got home late from the show but he came home much later with tales of meeting these childhood heroes. Almost a decade later I got my own chance when my wife set me up on a date with her childhood friend. Cathy and Lori had been friends as young girls and years later ended up as co-workers at the Salt Lake Tribune. One evening my wife surprised me by telling me she had arranged for me to go with Lori to the Styx concert as Lori would be writing the review for the paper. I was elated and took my wife up on the offer.

Lori guarded the real surprise until we got to will call to pick up the tickets. First came the tickets and then the backstage and press passes as well. This was better than anything Jeff had done and the concert was everything I hoped it would be. When you are about to meet a lifelong hero, the one thing that runs through your mind is, “Don’t be an idiot.” You know these people have blubbering fans accost them on a near daily basis and you do not want to be lumped into one of those.

After considering my options I decided that I would simply greet them with a thank you for all of the good memories they had helped me create. But I did have one question that I thought would impress Tommy Shaw. During a concert years earlier he had sung an alternative verse to Crystal Ball. Apparently he wrote seven or eight but only two appeared on the album. Surely it would appear cool that I had tried to commit the new verse to memory from a single hearing. So when I approached Mr. Shaw I asked if I remembered the words correctly.

If you should see me wandering through your dreams tonight

Would you please direct me to where I ought to be?

Just find for me a Crystal Ball to shed some light

And find a future in me, and find a future in me.

Mr. Shaw seemed duly impressed that I had remembered the words across the decades. The only problem is he corrected one or two words. Now I can’t remember if my memory is the corrected version or just the way I remembered it.