B is for Bruce.

The Birthday Book has this quotation:
“A spark neglected makes a mighty fire.”
– Robert Herrick

This sparked – HA! –  me thinking of Bruce Springsteen’s immortal Dancing in the Dark, and then – of course – his back catalogue rendered in 17th Century styles (‘This tale/a vale/does hail:/Ah me!/Mary,/the lea…’ ‘Upon Mary’s Dress’,  ‘To the Bootleggers, To Roll of their Tapes’, etc).

Then Bruce popped up in the news, dancing with his mum at a gig. I’ve thought he’s awesome since I was 9, and he’s still here, still going, still awesome.

Some more Springsteen to close below. Just need to mention that this post was almost set for yesterday, April 1st. I had a riff on the REM lyric (End of the world as we know it), apparently inspired by a dream about being at a party where everyone had the initials LB:

Leonard Bernstein,
Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs
Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom!

Right? Right. Except in my April Fool’s conceit of getting the letters wrong, and it not being true, it was people called BS – Bruce Springsteen, Bruce Sterling, Ben Stiller, Bill Stewart…)

Ultimately I decided against it, partly on the grounds of becoming personally confused by the concept (“So, is this going to be the actual A to Z post, or just a joke post?”), and mostly because I just wanted it to be all Bruce S.s… then it was pretty much straight away all Bruce.

K-Bruce, my FM station. “All Bruce! All the time!”

And a 1, a 2, a 1, 2, 3, 4.

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