As you would have been reminded by John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band had you been listening to the radio 25 years ago, things are tough all over. And as Bruce Springsteen might have reminded John Cafferty, stop ripping me off, you Rhode Island poseur, things are tougher in New Jersey than they are anywhere else. Sad evidence of that today, with word that Toms River High School North music teacher Albert Crosta was arrested Monday after selling $1,300 worth of school-property musical instruments to a second hand shop. Clarinets, a violin, French horn and cymbals, everything.

The news seems particularly crushing considering that, just last January, an Asbury Park Press article entitled "Toms River North's Band Marches On" (opening sentence: "And the band played on...") reported that "The school has never given into some people's theory that rival school, Toms River High School South, eclipses it in spirit."

Come this fall, at the annual game known locally as "The Civil War," when North's cheerleaders do their best to rouse the crowd to a fight song played on a single Casio keyboard (not unlike the one used so prominently in that John Cafferty song, perhaps), well, we'll see whether or not "some people's theory" indeed proves true.