Orel Family

December 14, 2025. The Stone Pony, Asbury Park, NJ I wasn't even supposed to be here. I was just laying low in Michigan. Oh I was planning to come visit until Saturday anyway, to see my ailing mother at the hospital, and then things got bad and things got worse and I was on a 6am Monday flight out here with no immediate plans to go home. When I got to Overlook, words were gone. Food intake gone. Responses to prompts were gone. This is how it was, all week. A gerontologist called it "delirium" and I learned what "decompensation" means. I wasn't sure she'd last the week. I started making the calls - funeral home, cemetery, spiritual leaders. But... she didn't die. Eddie Manion's facebook post, 11/13/25 On Saturday, I happened to see a facebook post from Eddie Manion ,  "Rehearsing for the show at t he Stone Pony tomorrow!" My immediate reaction was, "this... is possible... if mom stays with us." I asked some friends about the s...

Last night in Pittsburgh Bruce Springsteen concluded more than two years of touring by performing with Joe Grushecky and the Houserockers at Soldiers and Sailors Hall. While we never know where Bruce might show up, this seems to be the end of scheduled dates, at least for a while. Bruce came on stage at 9pm in his plaid shirt for his initial mini-acoustic set, as the audience lit up in the collected glow of hundreds of cell phones trying to capture the moment. His first song, "Further On (Up the Road)," delivered slowly and sung low, drove home the point: This is it. For a while. Racing in the Street '78 Bruce said, after that first song, "it's always nice to come to Pittsburgh and try something I haven't tried before." He added that every song writer is good for about 2 or 3 songs their whole lives, that "Cadillac Ranch" and "Darlington County" are really the same song, and that "it works if you refresh and rewrite the...

I tried my best this year to avoid all of the Super Bowl hype. Sure, I've been watching them at least since Otis Taylor made mincemeat of Bud Grant's secondary, but I have long since grown tired of all the pre-game festivities. So, I tuned it out. Even with Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band finally on the bill as half-time performers, I did my best to ignore the details, paying only glancing attention to the interviews and none at all to reports from people at the rehearsals. I could be surprised live, along with most of the rest of the country. When I thought of writing something, of course my reason was to write of Bruce performing. After all, one of the famous apocryphal stories of Bruce was of his former manager, Mike Appel, attempting to get Bruce on the bill for a Super Bowl pregame show, in part by dangling an otherwise unknown song called "Balboa vs. the Earth Slayer." That was in 1973. Bruce was releasing a new album two days before the big g...