They Had Me at "Good Morning, This is Your 6 Am Wake Up Call"

"I'm changing, arranging, I'm changing..I'm changing.....everything." - "Reflections of My Life", Marmalade.

Tonight I read a blog post my husband wrote about how I am now a football widow. I told him it's cool because I don't need him for the rest of football season anyway - I've got "Men of a Certain Age" now.

As soon as I starting hearing about this show, I knew I was going to watch it. I watched the pilot tonight, and yep, I'm in for the season. I could tell from the very first shot of Ray's face, recently separated, lying in bed in a hotel room at 6 am, looking slightly unsure and anxious. Unlike some, I am a big Ray Romano fan. I grew up with his ilk in NY/NJ. I adore him. Hell, I married a Long Island boy - I like the genre. I always knew he had something like this in him.

A few scenes later, he's in the car listening to music, and the song he is playing is "Reflections of My Life", by the band Marmalade. My heart stopped for a fraction of a second. I momentarily turned into that guy on Seinfeld who can't talk when "Desperado" plays. "Shh! Elaine, this is my song."

That Marmalade song has haunted me since I heard it the first time, c. 1969. I forgot about it for a while until I went to college. Then it popped into my head one day when I was feeling particular miserable. (Alvy Singer, in "Annie Hall": "I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable.") I searched the record stores in Athens, Georgia until I found it, and played the shit out of it - for months!! It just resonated with me, before I even could possibly know why.

I completely fell for Ray's character Joe at that moment, flawed as he seems to be. I kept wondering - is there any way that Ray could have actually modeled the character after me? Painful marriage issues, awkward moments in the car with a teenage daughter, tween-aged son in the backseat playing PSP, destructive addictive tendencies....what's not to love?

I get that there are two other popular and respected actors in the show, but I don't care about them :-) I know, I am supposed to love Scott Bakula! I just never have. But Andre "I'm forty-eight. I'm forty-mother-shit-eight!" Braugher was pretty damn good. I didn't know we were allowed to swear on TBS, either!

So, man, they dug up the band Marmalade for the pilot? I can't wait to find out what else is in store, musically and otherwise.