So, in this evening's phone call, Robert Rodriquez wanted to know the source of "One Meat Ball." I started to pontificate about Il Pescaballo, and Robert wasn't sure he believed me about the tie to Francis James Child. So, I went to the Il Pesceballo article in Wikipedia, and found this:

Il pesceballo, (The Fish-Ball) is a 19th-century American pasticcio opera in one act featuring the music of Bellini, Donizetti, Mozart, and Rossini, with a spoof Italian libretto by Francis James Child which makes use of some of grand opera's most popular melodies. The recitatives and chorus parts were written by John Knowles Paine, and James Russell Lowell translated the libretto into English.

Child was a Harvard English professor and opera lover, and the text was originally inspired by an incident which occurred to a colleague of his. One evening George Martin Lane was trying to make his way to Cambridge, MA, from Boston. He discovered that he had only 25 cents, which was not enough for both supper and the fare needed to get to Cambridge. As he was very tired and hungry, he stopped at a local diner and asked for half of a serving of macaroni. After he had recounted the story to his friends, he wrote a comic ballad, called the Lay of the One Fishball. A fishball was a fried New England concoction made of potatoes and fish stock, and usually eaten for breakfast. The ballad became very popular with Harvard students, and inspired Child's opera; it also became the source for the popular Tin Pan Alley song, "One Meat Ball".

"Charlie and the MTA" came almost a century later. so you can see that the "one more nickel" problem existed for a long, long time.
Now, it appears that the MTA is called the "T," or at least it was the "T" that goes from Duxbury to Boston. I took the "T," and am happy to report that I was able to debark with no problems. In fact, I got off right near the "Cheers" tavern, another icon of Boston pop folklore.
-Joe-