favorite bug?? ?
Once in high school I went to a Bruce Springsteen concert and it was a hot summer evening so the bugs were out in force and this one tenacious cicada flew right into Bruce’s face and bounced off onto the floor in front of him and he bent down to pick it up and held it out in front of the crowd and he said “all right, okay, I don’t want to cast aspersions on your local wildlife here, but North Carolina, can somebody please tell me—what the FUCK is this space-alien-lookin thing?” and a reporter took a picture and that was the image they used in the paper the next day: Bruce Springsteen looking perplexed while holding a concussed cicada
so yeah that’s my favorite bug, it was that specific cicada
I went looking for confirmation of this event (making sure I wasn’t just inventing a memory) and:
I’m glad there are lots of cool people who keep track of this stuff! But take it from the lame 15-year-old whose much-cooler parents took her to the concert in a vain attempt to turn her Cool(tm) via coolness-exposure-therapy (it did not work): the creature that Bruce held up was not “a locust” or “a cricket, apparently.” It was a cicada. I may not know my Brilliant Disguise from my Dancing in the Dark, but I know my local insects and that bug was absolutely a cicada!
Sadly, I think I did make up the thing about the picture in the newspaper. The site above contains teeny little images of my local paper’s reporting on the concert, and that picture of Bruce at the mic is the one I thought I remembered, but it doesn’t look like he’s holding the bug in that pic. Aww.
