Courtesy of
Backstreets.com, here's the setlist for the Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band concert Greg and I took my parents and brother to last night. Did I mention our seats were in the 27th row?
From Small Things/The Rising/Lonesome Day/Night/Be True/Atlantic City/Empty Sky/Waitin' on a Sunny Day/Darlington County/It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City/Worlds Apart/Badlands/Out in the Street/Mary's Place/Streets of Philadelphia/Into the Fire/Thunder Road
First Encore: Incident on 57th Street/I'm Going Down/Ramrod/Born to Run
Second Encore: My City of Ruins/Land of Hope and Dreams/Pretty Flamingo/Rosalita/Dancing in the Dark/I'm a Rocker
The show started almost an hour late and didn't get over til after 11:30. We missed our train home and had to take a $35 cab ride out of the city. I was really pissed about that part last night and it wasn't helped by the fact that I hardly ate yesterday - but Bruce played
Thunder Road and today, after I've had some sleep, I can say again that it was all good. They are seriously the best live band in the entire world. It was amazing, even if he did play a bunch of obscure stuff and I hardly knew the words to anything. We had a great time.
I'm reading Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis - the book about obsessive/competitive/talented/all of the above Scrabble players. It's fascinating in a number of ways but it makes my head hurt. I am not a fabulous Scrabble player; Greg almost always beats me. Reading about how these people memorize hundreds of word lists and study the Scrabble dictionary and play anagram games and heaven knows what else almost makes me never want to play the game again. I love words, but I am definitely not freaky about them. Not this freaky, anyway.
Over the weekend we finally saw Lilo and Stitch, thanks to the glory of Netflix. It was very good; we both thought it was cute and funny and for the most part well-written (though nowhere near as well-written as a Pixar movie). I just want to know one thing: could Disney possibly make an animated film about a family where one or both of the parents hasn't died?
Out of the million ways there are to create dramatic tension, Disney picks the one-or-both-dead-parents scenario every time. It's usually the mother that's dead, too - Jasmine, Ariel, Belle, Cinderella, Snow White, none of these girls had mothers (I understand that if you're sticking to the original fairy tales on some of these, that it's the same in the original stories. But they screw with the original stories so much; why not add in an extra parent?). Lilo and Noni had two dead parents. Simba's father died horribly. So did Bambi's mother. Dumbo had no father. Pixar seems to have followed the Disney lead on this - there's only a mom in Toy Story, and Nemo loses his mother in the beginning of the movie.
If we have all sorts of families in the world now, why is Disney only talking about the ones with dead parents?
