Working on a Dream

Late in my fifties, I have become a groupie. The past two Tuesdays, I went to see Springsteen at the Spectrum, a Philadelphia venue Bruce has played 51 times, each time to a sold out crowd. The arena will be demolished at the end of the month. As a farewell to the old place, Springsteen and the E Street Band performed in their entirety three of his earliest albums on four different concert nights. Though Springsteen was the cover boy of AARP Magazine, having turned 60 this past September, his fans span generations. The twenty-somethings in front of us,far younger than the album, Born to Run, knew every word of every song. Philadelphia, the city of Rocky and cheese steaks only a cast iron stomach could digest, the city whose sports teams, until last year, were perennial also rans,loves Springsteen. We love the way he comes on stage energetic and doesn't stop moving or engaging us for close to four hours. No curtain warmers. No intermissions. A working man. You take your seat and he takes the stage. In a few minutes you and everyone else is out of your seat. Whatever sorrow you brought into the Spectrum, is ushered out the door. Even when he's singing what the critics the next morning will dub his "downer" songs, you are feeling whole and lifted.

The first Tuesday was planned months ago by my friend, Jeanne, the Springsteen addict who turned me on to his concerts, and included our husbands. As we walked out of the arena, singing and giggling in the colder than usual night, Jeanne told me she had heard there were still a few seats left for the last of the four concerts, a week away. "Want to try to get a couple?" She had a rough weekend of family crisis coming up; I've been in a blue funk. "It would be totally crazy," I answered. We decided "totally crazy" was just what we needed.

Jeanne's crisis weekend was harder than she anticipated. Mine was more blah. The seats we assumed would be terrible ("behind the stage" we were told, but really they were to the side, right where you could see every sweat bead and smile and crease mark in Bruce's jeans) were great. The audience bonded even before the band took the stage that second Tuesday. The night before, our Phillies (World Champions the year before but still the Rodney Dangerfield of sports teams, assumed to be a fluke winner) had hung in and come from behind to win a pennant-run up game against the Dodgers with 2 outs in the bottom of the ninth inning. If you made that game up for a poem or story, you would be told it needed to be made more subtle to be believable. We were in the Spectrum, everyone talking Phillies, when a security detail was spotted accompanying a VIP to his seat near us: Joe Torre, manager of our rival Dodgers. Instantly the crowd began to chant "Beat L.A." Torre was good natured about it all, understood that when fans are passionate, sports teams and performers are lucky, because passion is communicable. Torre waved and signed autographs on Phillies ticket stubs and then Bruce and the band came out and kept us all moving ("Born in the USA" that night)and for four hours we were all one. The next night our Phillies won another game, clinched their division title and secured a return trip to the World Series this year. Last year, their win came after a dry spell of nearly three decades. I thought fans would be blase this year, having come to see ourselves finally as winners, but we in Philadelphia are again delirious. Phillies red is on everyone. Total strangers chat in store lines about the moves of each player.

But this isn't a story about sports. This could be about writing. After decades of success, Springsteen's entitled the album and concert tour of his sixtieth year, "Working on a Dream." He's still working, though he can't need the money and would pack audiences into his concerts if he gave them half as much. He's still dreaming. For nearly four hours last Tuesday, he had thousands of people dreaming with him. Thousands of fists in the air, thousands of voices belting "tramps like us, baby we were born to run." I thought about the Phillies and those come from behind two runs. I thought about the friend beside me who had traveled and worked to help family members navigate the shoals of crisis though she wanted to hide from the pain. I thought about the story I've been stalled on for weeks and how I had been avoiding writing and feeling miserable, and I resolved to start back to it the next morning. It felt good to get back to work. Baby, we were born with passion; we were born to hang in.