The Boss

New T-shirt

I hope you’ll forgive yet another non-work-related posting – but definitely another fun one! My three daughters grew up listening to Bruce Springsteen records in our house (and yes, they were still vinyl records then), and when they heard that he was performing the last concerts at Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands in New Jersey – a local hometown hero coming back for the venue’s last hurrah — they decided to treat their Dad to a truly memorable event! So along with almost 60,000 other dedicated Boss fans, we were there when he & the E Street Band burned their way through more than thirty songs – Badlands, Born to Run, & the whole ‘Born in the USA’ album – in a triumphant fifth & final concert on October 9th. You can get a sense of the energy level in some of the bootleg clips of the concert posted on YouTube, including a favorite ‘No Surrender.’

On the way to see Bruce

My daughters know that I’m a big Bruce fan – I once drove the 140 miles from Chicago to Urbana, IL, to see him because I couldn’t get local tickets – and the hometown setting at Giants Stadium (soon to become a parking lot) made it especially fun. Three hours of high energy rock-n’-roll without any breaks is apparently now the benchmark for sixty-year old guys (thanks, Bruce), so I was told that I should no longer expect any sympathy whatsoever after a piddling three-mile run. The concert ended with inside-the-stadium fireworks, and his seventh & final encore was ‘Jersey Girl‘– an especially fitting tribute to my own three special & absolutely wonderful ‘Joisey girls’. You can see them in the picture (Lisa, Jessica & Sarah, from the left)…. and in the very lower left, the back of the head of my four-year old grandson Jackson, who is obviously taking after his grandpa (see the China CCTV note two postings below).