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Elianna: Do dreams come true? Me (after hesitating, with half a smile): Sometimes. Elianna: Sometimes I have bad dreams.

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Matt Orel

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Popular posts from this blog

Springsteen's North Carolina Boycott

Earlier today, Bruce Springsteen canceled an upcoming show in Greensboro, North Carolina. This is hardly the first time he's canceled a scheduled concert, not even on relatively short notice (the show was scheduled two days from now). Just 10 weeks ago, he postponed a show in New York just hours before the scheduled start time. In 2009, he canceled a show in Kansas City after some fans had already arrived at the arena for the show. In 1992, I traveled to California to see a pair of Springsteen shows in Mountain View, and they were both postponed, just a day before the first show. Of course, the circumstances were different each time. The New York show was postponed due to a major snow storm. The Kansas City show was canceled due to the death of one of Bruce's cousins who was also part of the crew for that show. The California shows were canceled due to illness. This time, it's different. This time, Bruce is choosing not to play the show. He's choosing not to play...

Opening Night: Springsteen on Broadway, June 26, 2021

The most important thing to note about Bruce Springsteen's Opening Night in his return engagement of Springsteen on Broadway, is that there was an opening night of Springsteen on Broadway, of anything on Broadway, of live music, of entertainment. As Bruce noted in his opening remarks, it was good to see people sitting next to each other, no masks, for his show. Over the past 15 months in the spiritual diaspora, it was easy to lapse in to a mode of thinking in which such an evening seemed too far away to grasp. The vestiges of the pandemic remain, though. Outside the theater, several dozen anti-vaccine activists protested the theater policy that only people vaccinated for COVID-19 would be allowed to enter (and yes, the theater did check, so if you're thinking of going to this show, make sure you have your evidence). Inside the theater, people crowded the souvenir and $20 drink lines, as if to prove a point that they could. The St. James Theater was not sold out, and secondar...

We Take Care of Our Own

January 19, 2012

A few days ago, an article appeared in the Hollywood Reporter. The headline read, "Bruce Springsteen's New Album Is His 'Angriest' Yet." Uh-oh. Bruce Springsteen is "liberal." When he goes off, self-described "conservatives" go wild. Laura Ingraham wrote a book called Shut Up & Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the UN are Subverting America. It was a best seller, even. I don't personally know anyone who actually read it, but that doesn't matter: When Bruce speaks out, there's inevitably a chorus of comments across the country: "Shut Up and Sing!" Sometimes, it goes a bit further. In March, 2011, Springsteen wrote a letter to The Asbury Park Press, commenting on a story that had appeared in the paper 4 days earlier. The letter read, in part, "Thank you for your March 27 front-page story by Michael Symons. 'As poverty rises, cuts target aid.' The article is one of the few t...

A note from Youngstown... by request

Since starting this blog, blogger says I've created 138 entries. Some are just pictures or quips, some are writings, and some probably have links that need to be replaced. But in some way they were all original works. Except, however, for this intro and a couple of the pictures to follow, this one is from Scott Williams, a young man from the Youngstown, Ohio, area. Scott attended Bruce Springsteen shows in Auburn Hills and Cleveland , found my email address (along with btx and a few others), and sent this report. And, Scott: Yes, "Youngstown" totally rocked. Greetings! Recently I had the most amazing day of my life! Since it was spring break, a teacher friend and I wanted to see if we could get another concert show under our belts before the summer (we were also going to Cleveland the following week). Since we didn't have to worry about school, we knew we had the whole day to work with, and seeing as the only concer...

Bruce Springsteen: High Hopes

December 28, 2013

Earlier today, Bruce Springsteen's latest album, High Hopes leaked far and wide across the interwebs. The official release isn't due until January 14th of the new year. The album is a hodgepodge of "our best unreleased material from the past decade," as Springsteen explains in the liner notes (already published at brucespringsteen.net ), where he adds, "I felt they all deserved a home and a hearing." Bruce previously wrote liner notes for Devils & Dust , which perhaps not coincidentally was also an album mainly of older unreleased material. As with the notes to that album, there are some poignant notes here: The Wall, a song that Bruce premiered in concert in 2003, was inspired by Walter Cichon, a member of a '60s Jersey Shore band called "Motifs." This is the best part of the liner notes, and arguably the best of the previously unreleased songs on the album. Much of the album has been heard before. Springsteen recorded High Hopes, w...

Name Day

We went down to the courthouse Wednesday morning, and the judge issued the order: As of this day, which is also our second child's 18th birthday, our child shall be known as Ezra Stanley. We filed the order with the clerk, ordered the new birth certificates, and save for some administrative details, it's done. Name Day! The old name is sealed. It's still in the records, it's in this blog . This is the same person who once had a bat mitzvah, the same person who sang and danced with Bruce Springsteen , the same person who swore that unicorns are real and that they eat unicorn food. I will leave those bits of history untouched. This is also the same person who has made art under the old name and new, and the same person who made a mess of our kitchen while we were away on Tuesday, leaving us to discover the concealed chocolate disaster zone. The shift between what was and what is... in some ways that was very slow, and in some ways it was sudden. There were behavio...

Glory Days (Baby's Back) -- Toronto, August 24. 2012

August 26, 2012

I imagine a future conversation between myself and Elianna: Me: "Bruce Springsteen once signed a used ticket stub I handed him, and gave it back!" Elianna: "Bruce played his harmonica in concert and then gave it to me!" Me: "I talked to Bruce once." Elianna: "I sang with Bruce. He told me I was awesome!" Me: "I shook Bruce's hand. Firm handshake, and he looked me right in the eye." Elianna: "Bruce took me by the hand and danced with me, then he picked me up and I waved to the whole stadium full of cheering people!" In this episode of Close Encounters of the Bruce Kind, I'm going to lose. But I don't mind. Not even 30 hours before show time, we weren't even going to go to Toronto for Bruce Springsteen's show there. I didn't have General Admission tickets, and after the kids were hooked on the GA experience in Auburn Hills and Buffalo in April, I didn't want to go to a big stadiu...

Wrecking Ball

February 19, 2012

Earlier this evening, a long-awaited message finally showed in my inbox: Bruce Springsteen's new album, Wrecking Ball, had finally leaked. It didn't take long for my inbox and facebook to overflow. Press reports had hinted that this was Bruce's "angriest" album to date, but coverage of some of the lyrics -- with Guthriesque references to bankers and robber barons and fat cats -- had left me concerned that the anger might come off as an over-the-top pose. I needn't have worried. One listen -- well, I guess it's 4 now, but the evening isn't over yet -- probably isn't sufficient to declare this a masterpiece. But it's damn good, and current. Musically and lyrically, the record is alive . Its people have been kicked in the gut and left to wither away, but they stand. Even the fallen stand to testify. Bruce's previous album, Working On a Dream, was largely a personal album dealing with issues such as the realities of mortality. So...

Star Trek: The Search for Logic

When Star Trek: The Motion Picture was released one fine late fall day in 1979, I went with 16 of my closest friends in Millburn High School to a screening at Essex Green. We had to be there when Admiral James T. Kirk and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise reunited on the bridge. And if the loving shots of the ship took too long, and if the movie itself was little more than a regurgitated TV episode (most obviously relying on a 2nd-season episode called The Changeling ), so be it. Many of had seen all 79 episodes of the original TV show, many, many times. After all, Star Trek aired in re-runs every night on Channel 11, right at dinner time. Three decades later, Star Trek has long since passed from being “must see.” The movies got better, for a while, including with the brilliant Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home . Then came the TV shows. Star Trek: The Next Generation was the first and best; besides making a catch-phrase of “sexy bald man,” it became compelling in its own righ...

The Persistence of a Memory

September 20, 2018

It was March 1980, and I was at the Statler-Hilton Hotel in New York City. I was at a party, but I was bored and on the whole pretty miserable. I was at the hotel as part of the National High School Model United Nations ( NHSMUN ). After a successful run in 1979 representing Nigeria, this time I'd been tapped for a coveted Security Council spot representing France. There, I got to support France's pro-nuclear energy stance, in the aftermath of Three Mile Island. 38 years later, that's about all I can remember of my positions that week. I also remember one of the delegates from the USA and the USSR, but only because we all went to the same college a few months later. In 1979, the delegation from my high school had been somewhat small. But I'd met up with my old camp friend Andy the first day, he was working the event on "security," and we had skipped out across the street one evening to sit courtside for a Knicks game. That was fun even though the Spurs go...

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