On the Dark Side: A Tale of a special moment between two lovers and friends

My Beautiful Wife™ and I were part of a 20 somethings group at our church early in our marriage.

We laugh, because my wife was over 30, and I was barely hanging on to my 20′s, yet because of my age, we were able to still go and hang out with young adults, most of them, 10 or so years our junior.

We were hanging out, throwing darts and playing Foosball when the topic of movies came up.

Favorites from the past.

“Oh man, I LOVED Eddie and the Cruisers” – I say.

“Yes! What was that song?” – My Beautiful Wife™ says?

“On The Dark Side” – says I.

Aside: While still a wee lad, HBO was in its early years. They would run the same movie over and over…and over(yes, they still do that today, obviously it works) and one June of my junior high years, I saw Eddie and the Cruisers perhaps 10 times.

It made an impression.

One of the movies’ characters, Frank Ridgeway, was a piano player (played by Tom Berringer) and being a classically trained pianist, I had dreams of running off to join a rebellious band, led by a grease ball with a bad attitude, much like Eddie Wilson (played by Michael Pare).

I also wanted to make cool Elvis-esque movements with my mouth. You know the one I am talking about – the snarl type thing? Michael Pare did that a couple times and I thought it was tremendously cool.

Back to the story:

We shared this moment…and much like you – if you aren’t a fan of Eddie and the Cruisers – our friends looked at us with “Deer in the Headlight” cluelessness.

But my wife and I connected.

Funny enough, we were out with some older married couples from the church about a week or so later, relating this story of ‘How funny it was to be the older people in the group who remembered this old movie’.

We told them what the movie was…and the song again…

And got the same “Deer in the Headlights” stares from our older friends too.

My Beautiful Wife™ and I still laugh about these two evenings. We connected with one another, while no one else seemed to have a clue!

We hadn’t talked about it previously, but it drew us together and tied our stories together somehow.

Here is the Video of the awesome song from Eddie and the Cruisers. (Notice the very cool piano riffs, and less than stellar lip syncing, that I didn’t notice when I was a teen.)