Steady. Steady, now. Bruce Springsteen was standing right next to me. The man who provided the sound track to a few decades of my life was a mere three feet away. We were both in the audience watching his wife, Patti Scialfa, perform onstage in a New York studio for a television special. I was to interview her the next day.
I practiced a line, just in case he caught my eye. She’s great, isn’t she? Emphasis on “she.” No, no, emphasis on “great.” But as Patti ran smoothly through song after song, he never did look around. Instead, he gazed at his red-haired wife with pride and delight, a little smile playing over his face.
The following day, I met Scialfa in a recording studio on the West Side, where she was putting the finishing touches on a couple of tracks. I had a mild knot of nerves in my stomach, but they vanished immediately as she ran over and warmly said hello, catching both of my hands in hers. “I’m from New Jersey, too!” I cried, before realizing that she must hear that two hundred times a day.
She was funny and friendly and utterly unaffected. When the subject of her age came up, she moved her face under a nearby light. “I’m fifty,” she said matter-of-factly, lifting up her bangs so I could see her forehead. “This is what fifty looks like.”
There were so many things that I wanted to ask her. She told me about her girlhood at the Jersey Shore, where she hung out at the beach and cruised the streets in a Firebird and cut classes at Asbury Park High School to go into the city. At fourteen, she joined her first band, which I rejoiced to discover was called Ecstasy. Until recently, she said, she had forgotten that at the age of fifteen, she had called Springsteen, who lived a town over, to audition for his band. (He told her, firmly but kindly, that she was too young.)
The time slipped distressingly away as she reminisced about her days as a busker on the streets of New York, and her subsequent career as a singer with the E Street Band. Now she and Springsteen live with their three children in a nineteenth-century farmhouse in Rumson.
She laughed when I told her about the Jersey Boast. If you lived in Rumson or nearby, you were not issued your driver’s license unless you could do the Boast, a story of your personal encounter with Bruce and Patti that ended with the proud declaration that they were Just Like Us, i.e., “I saw Bruce and Patti at the grocery store/diner/dry cleaners, and they were so freakin’ down to earth. They were buying trash bags/talking to my sister’s cousin/eating pancakes while they sat in a booth, just like everyone else.”
As she continued to talk, I found that my teeth were dry and my cheeks hurt from smiling, and still, I listened, rapt. Before Scialfa’s publicist pried me away, I asked her about her home life with Bruce and the children. She said that the kids were grossed out when the two of them kissed in the kitchen, but that she told them, “Hey, you’re going to be happy one day when you look back and know your parents really loved each other.”
As she relayed that story, I felt the smallest, smallest pang of envy.