"Big Girls Don't Cry." Am I the only one who noticed that, in the first episode of The Sopranos this season, AJ was attempting to play "Big Girls Don't Cry" on his new drums? (That song title was once used as an episode title, back in Season 2.) The drum intro to that song is so familiar to me, because I adored The Four Seasons from the moment I first heard "Sherry" on my little transistor radio, when I was in, I think, 6th grade. The radio was a cute white rectangle, an iPod forerunner of sorts, and I used to take it to school and hide it in my desk and attempt to listen to it through an earplug. No one I knew had headphones, or even stereo sound then, certainly not on the radio, so you used an earplug, which was pretty much like having one earbud. "Earbud" is a silly word, but "earplug" is a strange word for something used to send sound into your ear.

Anyway, I would listen and listen to that thing in the hope that they would play a song I loved--and there was a point in 1962 when I loved every song in the top 20. The release of The Four Seasons' second single, "Big Girls Don't Cry" was a huge deal to me, and the sound of the drum intro on the radio would have filled me with joy in those days. You can listen to the beginning of the song here.

If you'd like to see more pictures of old transistor radios, you could start here. There seems to be some passion for the old things out there. The image I'm displaying is the closest I could come to my treasured old radio. Mine was white where this one is red, but that silver, angled, TV-shaped speaker lingers in the mind: I'm sure I had a Realtone.