I just got back from visiting Manhattan, seeing two shows I've longed to see for what seems like ages. One was 'Wicked,' the beautiful musical mounted on Gregory McGuire's story of 'The Wicked Witch of the West.'

One was 'Jersey Boys.' Aside from being terrific and funny and beautifully acted, it astounded me all over again at just what set designers can do with a little scaffolding, some lights, a table (the same table, used as a kitchen table, a Mob boss' negotiation site and a nightclub settee) and a couple of different '60s styles suits.

When I was about the age my daughter is now, ten, I discovered the radio. And at that time, Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons were still phenomenally popular. The Beatles had yet to arrive on our shores; and so I did my fifth-grade homework listening to 'Sherry' and ' Walk Like A Man.' Hearing John Lloyd Young sing those songs -- not in a falsetto, as Frankie Valli did, but in what amounts to a gorgeous counter-tenor voice -- brought me back to the glass-topped kitchen table, where the old pink Bakelite radio played.

AM was FM then. FM radio featured long-winded (to us) talk and long-hair music.

The radio stations "to hear" in Chicago were WCFL (the call letteres meant 'Chicago Federation of Labor') and WLS ('World's Largest Store,' at that time, Sears). Kids listened to WLS as far away as Thunder Bay, Ontario.

When I was older, a high school junior going on dates in the '70s with all my friends, we had signals. Two fingers held up to the person in the next car meant, "Switch to CFL." Three meant that the good song was on WLS. And the good song often was 'Big Girls Don't Cry' or 'Rag Doll.'

My son and his girlfriend now listen to The Four Seasons. They're astonished that I know all the words. But I don't have to read very far to touch those summer nights on the west side of Chicago when my boyrfriend came over dressed in gray dress pants and a Ban-Lon shirt, much prettier than I would ever be -- driving his grandfather's green El Dorado -- the radio on full blast.

I don't know that I live very much in the past; but sometimes it seems that we don't really ever get much older than sixteen in our hearts and souls and the beat that forces us to get up and dance.

Not all the people in the audience at 'Jersey Boys' were pushing 50. But Suzie Orman, the financial writer, was behind me, on her feet and dancing, and so were two girls in the row in front, who couldn't have been more than twelve.

Some music lasts forever. And this music, with its impeccable beat and stylish harmonics, is just this side of a Country-Western song for sheer raw yearning.

And I guess that', if anything, is what I miss most about being young. Yearning has an electricity that dims as we get older. Perhaps there's less, if we're lucky, to yearn for. Perhaps we lost the knack among our many exigencies.

But that night in the audience, I remembered the sight and sound and feel of it. And it amazed me with its power.