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everything.”  
    “I don’t think I’m ready for everything, but tell me about your sister and the band.”
    “Okay. Denise is twelve years older than me. She’s my middle sister, and the last to get married. She stayed home and took care of me and my Dad. My father was getting crazy, kept asking her why she wasn’t married – well, you’re Italian, you know – then one day she comes in with this guy, Dave Adamson, and says they’re in love and want to get engaged. Well, my Dad is happy because Dave is an electrical engineer, and he’ll always have a job, right?”
    “Right - the first priority for an Italian father. The guy may have one eye and sleep with his sister, but as long as he’s gainfully employed, he’s a keeper.”
    “Exactly. So, right after this, Dad goes off on some business trip, Denise invites Dave over and I find out the real story. Dave was managing his brother Joey’s band on the side, and what he really wanted was the band to be successful enough to quit his day job. Now, Dave had been telling Denise that the band was great, terrific potential, all that shit, but they needed a second vocalist and maybe a keyboard player. So Denise drags him over to our piano and makes me sit down and play for him. I’d been playing the piano for years, and I was really into the whole thing, writing and all sorts of shit, plus I  
    played guitar and I’d been singing forever. Dave thinks she’s crazy, till he hears me. So he calls Joey, Joey comes over with Seth, and we are just going to town. I mean, Joey’s a big R&B fan, and so am I, and we were kicking serious ass. So Dave figures I’d fit right in.”
    “Wait a minute. What about the whole geek thing?”
    “That was a problem. I was fifteen, but I looked about twelve. I was still really short, skinny, I wore glasses. It was awful.”
    Diane smiled. “Oh, God, I can just see it. The mild mannered Catholic schoolboy.”
    “Oh, big time. The rest of the band finally came over, we all got along great, but we couldn’t figure out how to get me on stage without the audience laughing out loud.”
    “So, what? How did you do it?”
      A waiter appeared with a basket of warm, fragrant bread. Michael broke off a piece and dipped it into a bowl of olive oil.
    “Try this,” he urged, “it’s incredible.” Diane followed his lead. It was delicious.
    “You’re trying to distract me with food,” Diane said accusingly. “What did you do? A wig? A Nixon mask? Lifts in your shoes?”
    “Close. We figured I’d just grow my hair really long so you couldn’t see my face and I’d sit at the keyboards so no one would notice I was only three feet tall.”
    “Okay, that would work, but what about your Dad?”
    “Well, he came home, and Denise told him the whole story, and of course, he freaked out. He’s a lawyer, and he wanted me to go to law school, right? Plus, he doesn’t want me around all the drugs and alcohol and everything else that went with rock-and-roll. But Denise said she’d make sure I kept up my grades, and she’d be with Dave at all our shows, and she promised my father that there would be no drugs or drinking.”
    “Wow. Isn’t that why guys want to join a band in the first place?”
    “Hell, that’s why I wanted to join.”
    “So she went on the road with you?”
    “Yeah. It was pretty bad for a while. She wouldn’t let those guys do shit. No beer, pot, coke, nothing. She’d follow them into the men’s room and flush stuff down the toilet.”
    “What a woman. So that just left sex, right?”
    “No. Thanks to me, she cracked down on that too.”
    “Oh, Michael, what did you do?”
    “I don’t know you well enough for that story.”
    The waiter took away their plates and brought Diane another drink. She looked startled.
    “What’s wrong?” Michael asked.
    “I usually don’t have two of these,” she explained. “I may end up dancing naked on the bar.”
    Michael grinned. “Then I’ll ask Teddy to keep them