Once, long ago in college, I went through the necessary ritual of dating. On Valentine’s Day my junior year, I received a gift from a young man I had been seeing for several months. He sent me a singing telegram of the song “You Light Up My Life.” I think he meant it to be “our song,” because a month earlier at Christmas, he gave me a spinning musical unicorn plinking out the very same “You Light Up My Life” on a metal cylinder. He was clearly very excited about the Christmas gift, he thought it expressed our relationship perfectly: a brass, horned equine, revolving on itself to strands of Debbie Boone. I accepted my Christmas gift with a bewildered smile, not knowing what to say. The poor boy never realized I absolutely hate the song “You Light Up My Life.”
