We never knew we could want more than that out of life

Last Play at Shea

(2010)

The Mets have been telling me for more that a year that I needed to see this, but then they've also been promising me winning baseball for the past several years, so their credibility is only a shade above that of Fred Wilpon's buddy Bernie Madoff. I figured, "yeah, yeah, yeah," boring concert-cum-nostalgia trip flick. But when Ms. Tonic recommended it, that changed the, you should pardon the expression, metric.

And yes, even though I could have done with less Billy Joel autobiography, and even though I was never sentimental over a stadium about which even its defenders famously acknowledged, "Yes, it's a dump--but it's our dump!" this is a surprisingly moving film. Because the point of it is, in a way, that Joel's autobiographies and the autobiographies of all the Brendas and Eddies--not only but maybe especially on his, and Shea's, native Long Island--makes more sense when intertwined with the biography of the place where not only the Mets and (blessedly, getting little attention here) Jets won and mostly lost, but where the Beatles first proved that rock & roll could be played, if not necessarily heard, in a faux-Colosseum.

And that helps me understand, and empathize with, all those Mets fans for whom the abandonment of that dump was a death of something in them. And, I guess, in me, whether or not (assuredly not) I'll ever wear one of those "I'm Calling It Shea" T-shirts to the new place next to the parking lot where the old joint used to be.

Of course, my autobiography is a very different thing from Brenda's and Eddie's--I've been a Mets fan as long as any of them could have been (and longer, in truth, than many of them have been alive, and longer even than more than a few of their parents have been alive), but most of that fandom was from a distance of a thousand miles or so. If I were sentimental about any Mets venue, it would be for the Polo Grounds, which I've seen only on film--and which, incidentally, is shamefully ignored here, as if while waiting for their home in Flushing to be made ready, the team had wandered the road like Philip Roth's Ruppert Mundys. And each of the marriages in that autobiography has a place for the much-married Billy Joel, too--he gave the best concert my first wife and I ever saw together, and The Stranger played in a continuous loop at a New Bedford lobster restaurant where my second wife and I had a leisurely dinner on our honeymoon.

By the way, JT, what I couldn't help thinking of during the trailer for Being Mick was Candy Slice's "Gimme Mick." Ah, Gilda, speaking of New York's lost and holy.