Can You Hear Me Now? Bruce Springsteen in a New Way

bruce-in-chicago

Classy as ever, Bruce and the band posted their Chicago River Tour concert for 2 days of free download.  It’s so far beyond amazing that I’m back in mourning that we’ll be out of the country when he comes to SFO.  I’d almost recovered but this is a major – if probably brief – relapse.

There’s nobody more capable of evoking super highs, and then tears – as he takes us on a journey with him.  This time though, my journey is different:  Springsteen was born in 1949; I’m a first-year Baby Boomer, born in 1946.  We’re no longer kids, certainly, but still grateful for the music and where it can take us.  For me, Bruce is the number-one tour guide.  Always will be.

Now this next thing is hard.  I listened to this concert a whole new way — my iPhone is paired with me new (hang on) hearing aids!  I was so mortified when I learned I needed them and a nervous wreck when I went to be fitted but they’re great.  I met a woman in the (where else?) ladies room at a big event yesterday and we were laughing at our worries and how surprised we were at what a difference they make.

Nothing – not the embarrassment or the nervousness or the appalling cost of these little things – none of that – comes close to the feeling of being able to walk around without headphones, sit at my desk without headphones — do almost anything without headphones – and still hear Thunder Road and Meet Me in the City and 31 other LIVE performances.

So hearing aids mean aging and I have to face that.  But they also hosted a real party today.

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Cynthia Samuels

Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families. For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million. She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings. She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com. Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World. A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.

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