It has a good beat and you can dance to it, Dick.

Back in prehistoric times there was a teenage dance show on TV (or so I'm told) called "American Bandstand". It was an hour of teens dancing, hamming it up for the camera, the latest pop idols coming on and lip synching to their newest release. All of this was hosted by a man named Dick Clark, and although he was so much older than those kids, he always seemed comfortable around them. I'm thinking he was trying not to show fear because they can smell it and he knew he'd be done for. There was a segment on that show called "Rate a Record", where they'd pull 2 especially attractive youngsters from the dance crowd and have them listen to 2 songs and decided if they liked it or not. Inevitably, if they liked it, Mr. Clark would ask them why. Their reply was almost always the same, "It has a good beat and you can dance to it." That's all the criteria they had. For Jerry and me, though, we've got just a little higher standards when it comes to selecting music for the reception. Don't get me wrong, we do want it to be danceable. But we also want every song to have meaning, either being something that played during the time we've spent together, or the lyrics say something about us, or the song reminds us of each other. We've been keeping a list in a little notebook Jerry gave me, and so far, if every song lasts about 3 minutes, we've got well over 2 hours of great music. Thankfully, Jerry's got a huge personal collection of songs and already owns most of the music we've chosen so he'll just burn a disc or 2 and we'll be ready to go. He knows so much about music (just as he does about movies, but we're not showing any at this shindig, so I won't go into that here), when I talk to him about it he's the Ann Sullivan to my Helen Keller. I love that about him.