Orel Family

November 11, 1972 January 6, 2026: Thank you, Cantor Wallach. Thank you, everyone, for coming this morning. Some of you I haven’t seen in many, many years. Thank you all for coming. A special thank you to Rose and Fayona, nurses who helped take care of my mom in her final weeks. I just have a few notes, I’m not going to take very long, I didn’t formally write anything but I sent myself a few notes that I’d try to say in a few minutes and that I thought might be worth hearing. I’m going to start with a brief story from something my mom and I experienced a few years back. I was back here 1990, it happened to be Tisha B’Av, which is, to those who are familiar, it’s one of two Jewish fast days on the calendar, the other, of course, being Yom Kippur. For whatever reason, I was here on a break from my job in California that day. My mom wanted to go to Kings to get some groceries for later on. It’s not one of those non-work days so you can do that, except of course Kings was sampling cookies,...

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...

2025 has presented an almost embarrassing haul of new released material by Bruce Springsteen. In June, Bruce released a 7-album set, "Tracks 2," focusing largely on unreleased material from the 1990s. And now... an item that seemed to many fans the holy grail of vault items, "Nebraska 1982," featuring most prominently the oft-rumored but never heard "Electric Nebraska" as well as 4 other discs. Bruce said many times over the years since "Nebraska" came out that he had tried out the tracks with The E Street Band and that everything he tried to do with the band just made the songs worse. So he ended up releasing the cassette tape he'd carried around in his pocket, of his original bedroom demos. But did we fans believe him? Uhhhh... maybe.  Anyway, now we have the evidence. Due to production delays, the official release won't make it out until October 24th, but the songs have started circulating. So... let's get to it! Was Bruce right? ...

The Q&A for Deliver Me From Nowhere: September 29, 2025 The new Springsteen biopic "Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere" has started making the rounds of major film festivals before wider release in October. Yesterday I saw one of the previews at the New York Film Festival , at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center. Yes, there is something special about seeing a film in a state of the art theater with a packed house of more than 1,000 people in New York City, especially when many -- most -- of the attendees are fans of the biopic's subject. There have been many recent biopics focusing on pop icons of the past 60 years. Typically, they fudge the history in the service of mythologizing the subject, leading to some crowning achievement. Think of "Bohemian Rhapsody" and Queen's triumphant performance at "Live Aid," circumstantial facts be damned. Or "A Complete Unknown" and its version of Bob Dylan surviving a violently booing and project...

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, September 6, 2025. Pollak Theater. West Long Branch, NJ. Photo courtesy of John Cavanaugh A DAY AT THE BEACH On the Beach in Asbury Park. September 5, 2025 We headed out on the road at 10am Thursday, determine to prove out that I could drive cross country in an EV, and pointed in the direction of my native land, New Jersey. I'll get back to the EV adventures hopefully soon. Pulling in to my mother's house at 10pm, it wasn't all that much slower than a gas-powered trip. My main objective for the trip was a series of events surrounding the 50th anniversary of "Born to Run." First things first: Aaron wanted a day at the beach. He wouldn't be able to go to any of the organized events due to his job, but he came up from Baltimore and for a few hours on Friday we were a family of 4 for a perfect beach day in Asbury Park. Being a few days after Labor Day, the beach was mostly empty. The undertow was too strong to go more than ...

Today was "The Main Event" of the Born to Run 50th Anniversary weekend at Monmouth University, and it was the most thrillingly unique day I've ever experienced as a Springsteen fan. Walking in to the Pollak Theater in the morning, I was immediately struck by how happy everyone seemed. Then I noticed how many in the capacity 750-seat room I've known for decades. Today was to document the anniversary, but in a way it was also for us. Consisting mostly as panel discussions and interviews, the day started with a Boom. Boom Carter, that is, the drummer that most Springsteen fans have never seen, who recorded exactly one song as a member of the E Street Band: Born to Run. Boom was joined by Garry Tallent and David Sancious for the first panel of the day, moderated by radio personality Tom Cunningham on the band as it existed from February through August 1974. Sancious was eloquent recalling events from long ago, though he also noted that in 1974 he was busy focusing on the ...