For You: Another open letter to Bruce Springsteen

We wrote an open letter to Bruce Springsteen before we saw him in concert a couple years ago. Assuming he didn’t get the letter (he didn’t play our request), we thought we’d try again for the concert coming up in a couple months…

Dear Bruce Springsteen,

As you scan the sea of signs surrounding the stage that plead for you to play one of your vintage classics at the Palace of Auburn Hills on April 12, my wife, Jennifer, and I won’t be there.

Instead, we’ll be holding up our “4 U” request all the way across the arena in one of its handicap-accessible areas. To see us, you gotta look hard.

While we could play the ticket lottery and get our numbers called to stand near the stage the entire concert, our Multiple Sclerosis forces us to stay in our reserved seats.

Combined we’ve had MS for nearly 25 years, and we each are living with very different forms of this disease. While I have the relapsing-remitting form and regularly compete in 5K runs, Jennifer has secondary-progressive MS and can no longer walk.

She uses a power wheelchair and this is why we must stay in the handicap-accessible area to experience the euphoria that you bring night after night after night after night.

Your music has 
pulled me through every phase of my life with MS:
 from fear and self-pity to anger and frustration and finally to acceptance and moving on with the vision of a brighter future. For that, I gratefully thank you.

And if it’s not too much to ask you for one favor: When you’re searching the fan-held signs for requests at the Palace of Auburn Hills in April, please look straight across the arena for my baby and me waving our sign asking you and the E Street Band to play a full-rocking “For You,” for us.

All the best,

Dan Digmann
Mount Pleasant, Michigan