Street Scene: Man With a Newspaper

About the picture . . .

Morning. A sunbeam. A paper. A little time. A hot cup. Does it get any better than this, my friends? Does it ever get any better than this?

I had an early meeting downtown on Tuesday, and so I arrived a little early and parked my car in one of the parking garages, then wandered around the streets and back alleys of State College, PA, for a half-hour before my meeting began.

The morning light was just starting to make its way down every street and alleyway, and I had great fun chasing the light with my camera. I have been walking the streets of this town for more than 30 years and I never grow tired of it. What I captured were the gentle morning scenes of a town waking up: a gentleman quietly smoking a cigarette amid the lovely arches of a brick courtyard, the gray alleys with their interesting lines and the light just starting to crest the tops of the buildings, the reflection of blue sky everywhere if you would just look UP, an obscure doorway painted with skull and cross-bones, sunlight streaming through colorful bottles lined up along an apartment's kitchen window.

And then I rounded a corner and found myself looking right down Beaver Avenue into a well-lit street scene: a man in a hat, sitting at a cafe enjoying his morning newspaper. Oh, how I wished for just a few more minutes so that I could get something at that cafe and sit at one of its little tables on the street in a sunbeam, watching the passers-by.

When I'm out in the street,
I walk the way I wanna walk.
When I'm out in the street,
I talk the way I wanna talk . . .
Baby, out in the street, I don't feel sad or blue
Baby, out in the street, I'll be waiting for you

The song to accompany this scene is Bruce Springsteen's Out in the Street.

About the song . . .

The version of this song that I've selected is Bruce and the E Street Band's performance at Madison Square Garden in the summer of 2000. The band had gone their separate ways for a while in the late 1990s, releasing solo albums, but in 1999, they got back together for what was billed as a reunion tour. The first leg of their tour, through the middle of 1999, was Europe. The second leg was North America, and it went into the fall of 1999.

The third and final leg of the tour kicked off on February 28, 2000, at Penn State's Bryce Jordan Center (maybe a mile or two from where this picture was taken), and I was there. It was my first-ever Springsteen concert and it was spectacular, as good as anything you can imagine. No, even better than that. I have never before and probably never will again see any group of people so happy to be in each other's company, so happy to be back together and making music together. Their excitement and energy and sheer enjoyment of each other was palpable. Watching them, you couldn't help but smile. And dance!

I had to work hard to get there: I was on the phone for hours trying to get tickets the day they went on sale, and I was just starting to despair that I'd never get through, but then I did! And they had just released a bunch of seats right behind the stage. The tickets I got were about a dozen rows up from the stage. And so when The Boss got up on the piano and turned and faced the crowd behind the band and sang, it felt like he was singing just for me, baby, just for me. I think my heart almost burst that day. It is one of the moments I treasure and hold in my heart.

And my brother - perhaps the only person in the world I know of who just might be a bigger Springsteen fan than me - he was standing by my side, boogeying the whole three and a half hours of the performance. My oldest sister and I had made his life dream come true: we bought his and his wife's tickets for their very first Springsteen show. (At least once in your life, try to make someone else's dream come true. I highly recommend it.)

Springsteen concluded that tour with a series of 10 sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden in June and July of 2000. Songs from several of those were recorded for HBO and later released on an awesome two-DVD set, Live in New York City (2001), which you can purchase through Amazon for about twelve bucks. There is also a CD from the same set of performances. If you consider yourself a Springsteen fan, you absolutely MUST check them out!