On Broadway
Danielle Truscott
Word Count 1050
In early September of 2021, I spent the first part of an evening at the St. James Theater, rapt by Springsteen on Broadway.
I’ve never been a diehard fan of The Boss, though I love certain Springsteen songs. I was born at the early end of Generation X. His music backdropped countless alternately wild and tender coming-of-age moments.
My companion, Michael, a Boss aficionado, and I had bonded as sensitive elementary school kids turned tween co-miscreants and make-out bandits, in a small, mostly working-and-middle class town.
We settled into our steep balcony seats. Amidst the Covid-masked crowd’s muffled cacophony, a bright voice rang out my way. One of two nearly duplicate older ladies seated directly below us turned, beamed up.
Hello! she whooped. Brown eyes sparkled above a jauntily decorated mask. I was saying “Hello!” but I wondered “Is there anybody out there?” She chuckled, good-naturedly mocking fabled Manhattanite aloofness, then torqued back for a Covid elbow bump. I’m Alice and this—she gestured right—is Mary-Kate. Like Alice, Mary-Kate sported a puff of chin-length white hair and New England picnic, rather than Manhattan theater, garb. Indeed, they revealed, they were lifelong best friends from a small town outside Boston. We introduced ourselves, all chatted awhile like we knew each other, like they were aunts of an old friend.
Alice proffered tissues from her pocketbook pack. If you’re a crier, you’re gonna need these, she warned. I’ve seen this show three times. Haven’t left once with a dry eye.
Lights dimmed. The Boss walked onstage. I heard Alice sniffle and patted her right shoulder. Somehow, strangers in this mammoth theater, we’d already convened a small community—openness, connection, goodwill.
For almost three hours, New Jersey’s rock n’ roll Shakespeare expanded this feeling until it filled the 1,700-plus-seat hall. Telling stories—interspersed with acoustic guitar, piano, and his singular voice—Springsteen unwound deeply meaningful life themes in his precisely American way. He wove tapestries of romance, glory, tragedy, and grief, from birth to death. Of the love and damage that knit families and communities, uniting them, and tearing them apart. Of youth’s fierce sunburst and old age’s poignant, moonlit memories. Of how important it is that we recognize that love—and our rootedness, and respect for the rootedness of others—is what strengthens us, what makes our humanity prevail. I gripped Michael’s forearm during 1975’s “Born to Run,” saluting bright and curious small-town American teenagers’ impulse to freedom. I sobbed, whimpering toward Alice, tapping for more Kleenex, during 2001’s “American Skin (41 shots),” sorrowful anthem to racism’s persistence and community’s decay, evidenced by the 1999 police shooting of Amadou Diallo.
The venue’s cavernous space seemed to shrink to that of the heart of a neighborhood block. You felt connected—as Alice had instantly connected with us—with those around you. The room resonated with humanity, with soul, with authenticity, with Springsteen’s candid, luminous performance a delicious, existential home-cooked meal we’d all shared, been nourished by in places we’d even forgotten.
I felt aglow with inner, and communal, health.
Our spirits were sated, but bellies empty, Michael and I headed to Soho. Nothing was open. We zig-zagged past bistros shuttering prettied-up Covid sidewalk eateries, inquiring where we saw evidence, if waning, of dining activity: No, no, closing for the night. Then, rounding West Broadway’s southeast corner, an awning, twinkling lights.
I was pleasantly disoriented—the way you can be when you’ve been transported by an experience. I didn’t realize until I stuck my head in the door to get the maître d’s attention that we were in Cipriani in its latest iteration.
We sat at one of the outside tables, all unoccupied. I ordered a glass of white wine, opting for the $16, rather than the other, $100-plus, option. Our light, tasty supper satisfied.
A convertible Porsche roared to rest along the curb directly in front of us, on the otherwise deserted block. A kid, mid-twenties, bawled out to the maître d’ by name as he crankily jammed his thumbs at his iPhone, not looking up: Six Bellini’s! Outside! His date, an athletic beauty I reckoned freshly plucked by Elite or Ford from her Nebraska varsity volleyball team the week before, galloped out of the car. He just bought it today! Today! It’s BRAND new! she cheered to anyone, mostly staff, listening.
TODAY! BRAND NEW! She repeated her lines, anxious to please her rude, wealthy date, and perhaps to mask his vibratory insecurities.
Bellini’s delivered were downed at raceway speed, more argued for, and granted. The maître d’ and a waiter hovered around the car and then the pair’s table, complimenting—less with genuine interest than obsequious fluttering, overtly with an eye to a possibly large and much-needed tip.
Simultaneously tray two of Bellini's, and friends of the pair, apparently summoned to Porsche-gawp, arrived. The Porsche was dutifully exclaimed over. The quartet slurped back Bellini’s.
The slow creep of ill-feeling at the self-conscious opulence, at the impersonal, attention-seeking, texting-plagued, cash-tastic ethos of our now environs expanded in much the same way the exact opposite sensation had at the Springsteen show with the young people ignoring each other; the fawning waitstaff bored, gossiping amongst themselves with a quietly mocking air; the seemingly total absence of care, of human ties.
Then the inconceivable happened.
A second, newer Porsche roared to rest at the curb just behind the first. The owner, in his forties, well dressed, accepted a drink offered by the maître d’.
Passersby snapped photos of Porsche Two, the only such model released to date, evidently just hours before.
The owner of the first Porsche slunk down in his chair. His girlfriend did, too, flamingo-twisted endless legs around each other, and hunched over her phone, as if to reduce herself, texting as did the friends, eyes down, squirmy, presumably to one another about how to soothe her boyfriend, whose moneyed envy was as visceral as a human-shaped swarm of Murder Hornets.
No one seemed to even admire the cars for their particulars, just for their newness and price. They might as well have been insanely expensive blenders. Or toilets.
Porsche Two’s owner, cocktail finished, hopped back in his car. After a moment we realized he didn’t know how to start it.
A car-tech savvy busboy was dispatched to sort it out and he disappeared into the city.
Danielle is the author of a forthcoming memoir and is currently at work on a psychological thriller set in her ancestral village on England’s southeastern Cornish coast in England. She served on the board of the PEN American Center from 2010 to 2016, helping to rewrite its mission statement and by-laws, heading the committee for Authors’ Evenings, and working with the PEN Prison Writing and Freedom to Write programs. In 2018/19, she co-founded, curated, and contributed most of the books for a library at a bilingual, progressive school in Antigua, Guatemala. Currently, she works as a freelance writer, ghostwriter, and soup-to-nuts editor of fiction, narrative nonfiction, and correspondence for companies and human rights organizations. After living in downtown New York City for nearly a quarter-century, Danielle now lives happily on a winding rural road in Connecticut.
