Roberta
Song: Roberta
Album: Streetlife Serenade (1974)
“Roberta” is another one of the songs on this record that feels incomplete. There is a good idea at the heart of the song; someone is longing to get to know a girl named Roberta who might be a sex worker of some sort. This is not an uncommon musical theme and Billy Joel does a commendable job trying to convey a sense of longing for her but it gives little indication of why he feels they’d make a good match beyond the line: “It’s tough for me. It’s tough for you.”
He also indicates that the person longing for Roberta also lacks the money he’d need to keep her in his life. Am I to assume that she is a high priced sex worker? What if she just has expensive taste in clothes? Has he asked her out on a date? Maybe she’d say yes. She might be waiting for him to make the first move.
Ultimately “Roberta” leads to more questions than it can answer. After repeated plays I’m no closer to figuring it out so I think it’s best to talk about more of my history with Billy Joel’s music.
For the sake of continuity, the rest of this update picks up where the Streetlife Serenader recap left off. If you haven’t read that one, go check it out. The rest of this will make a lot more sense if you do.
Okay, here goes.
By the fall of 1984 the special gym classes were behind me and there was no more talk of surgery or therapy. A year earlier I had enrolled in a new school and my mother and I devised a simple plan to prevent me from being kept out of class activities; we kept my medical history secret. As far as the official record was concerned I had never had a problem. I still walked kind of crooked and people still noticed, but it was getting better.
With my physical issues less of a factor I could focus on making friends. Being singled out for special treatment in my previous school had made me very self-conscious and shy but I was working hard to overcome it. Still there was a significant gap between what I wanted to do and what I actually did. Even if other kids didn’t see me as different, I still did and as a result I still kept to myself more than I should have.
In the fall of 1984 I was 10 years old. While Billy Joel was still riding high on the success of “An Innocent Man,” I was starting fifth grade. One of my classmates that year was an absolutely wonderful girl who loved Billy Joel, and I mean LOVED him. She talked about Billy Joel all the time, she read the class articles about him and I’m fairly certain that she talked about marrying him someday. Remember that this was at the height of Michael Jackson’s fame so as popular as Billy Joel was; the girl in my class took her Billy Joel fandom to an unprecedented level.
As far as I was concerned this made her special, not strange. Even at ten years old I knew that I lacked the confidence to stand up and allow myself to be noticed for something. Instead of talking about the things I liked I tried to blend in and go unnoticed but every time the girl in my class talked about Billy Joel (which was often enough that it stands out in my mind 27 years later) I wanted to tell her that I knew a little something about Billy Joel too. I had seen all of his videos on MTV and I knew the “52nd Street” album backwards and forwards thanks to my year of special ed gym class…and that is why I didn’t say anything.
While I realize today that there is no way that my classmate would have known this I was worried that she would find out how I knew that record so well. As if me saying “I used to listen to that record at my old school” was code for “My name I cripple-y Pete and I went to a special gym class for weird kids where we bowled and listened to Billy Joel.”
So that’s why she and I never discussed Billy Joel, not that year, or any other year we went to school together. I spent a lot of my younger years being afraid for the wrong reasons. Eventually I got past this.
My fifth grade classmate and I did finally discuss Billy Joel, thanks to Facebook. This happened about a week ago. Better late than never I suppose. She still likes Billy Joel but I don’t think she married him, that’s probably for the best.
