The Beau Brummels released a great single in 1965 called Don't Talk To Strangers.
Driving jangle guitars, a stunning lead vocal from Sal Valentino, real name Salvatore Willard Spampinato, and yawking out-of-tune backing vocals which sounded like feral cats fighting on barbed wire.
It was not a hit - they only had two of those - but it was a time capsule that mists the eyes.
I still play it.
The title must have sat in the cerebral central office for quite a while, as it was not until well through the 1990s that I began actually talking to strangers.
If I saw someone standing against a wall at a party trying to appear self-contained, where, as one of those pretenders myself, I knew they were burning slowly in Hell's Hobbs, I would not move a muscle.
I had no interest at all in people I did not know, and I was shy to the point where I probably needed medication.
But complete strangers can turn out to be fascinating.
You will never know unless you try.
And once I started brazenly baling people up, it was like opening a door to a new life.
Of course I had always hated people doing this to me.
In my first year at university, an introductory education lecture in Marama Hall attended by virtually every girl at Teachers College, one of whom I presumed I would marry by the end of the day - I went to Otago Boys High School - a man twice my age in a hound's-tooth jacket came racing along the row to sit next to me.
He proffered a very uncool old man's hand, said his name was Steve and he was at university to make friends, because that was what university was for.
I could only presume he had been kicked out of everything else.
But there are ethical grounds for baling up strangers.
A few years ago on a domestic flight, I finished up sitting next to a young woman, who was staring fixedly ahead, her hands gripping the armrests so tightly her knuckles glowed through her hands like kryptonite.
We had not even taken off.
I decided idiot psychobabble from someone who had been around the block might take her mind off impending death.
It turned out she was originally from the West Coast, and had run away to join the circus at 12.
I had never seriously believed people did that.
I probed further.
She stayed with the circus for a while, did not mind all the dirty work, liked the people, and her mother came around too, telling her she should always follow her heart.
Now she was following her heart to a training course for air hostesses.
She admitted it was a bit crazy wanting to be an air hostess when she was terrified of flying, but she said you never know how things turn out unless you give it a go.
The carny was enriching.
A podiatrist on another flight was so interesting and informative I now go every eight weeks, albeit not to her, and an itinerant lecturer in autism at Otago University taught me things about autism I never picked up from Kim Hill or Rain Man.
I know a heap of our neighbours and their back stories after living here just four years: at our last house, I knew far less after 31.
But you can also strike out when baling up those for whom conversation is an anathema, the humourless, the grim and the tight-lipped.
Pretty much always men.
The only spotlight these people have ever experienced in their lives, as Jeremy Winders would say, was when they opened the fridge door.
After such teeth-grinding contests of semantic Sudoko, it is really best to metaphorically tip the hat and slink away.
I stood briefly beside Sal Valentino in a Los Angeles queue in 1984.
My friend told me it was him.
I still was not talking to strangers then.
A shame.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
