The March Madness Festival is on in downtown Dallas' Reunion Park. Sunday’s headliner is Bruce Springsteen – who, for three decades, has pulled fans onstage during “Dancing In The Dark.” Vanessa Quilantan wants to be next. She isn't just planning to hold a sign at the show and cross her fingers -- the Dallas Observer clubs editor has launched a social media campaign to convince The Boss.
Quilantan was 4 years old when she saw a prince who made Cinderella’s dance partner look pretty weak.
He was wearing blue jeans on VH1. So was his princess, who had short hair like him. He found her in the front row.
“To be picked out of a crowd, like some kind of rare and beautiful flower – like, what woman doesn’t want that, you know?" Quilantan says.
She was watching Bruce Springsteen pull a young, then-unknown Courteney Cox onstage in the “Dancing In The Dark” video from 1984.
“It was just like the most grandiose, romantic, gesture I had ever seen."
Quilantan is 24 now. When she heard Springsteen was coming to Dallas, she made up her mind. She would dance with The Boss -- like scores of fans chosen to join him over the decades. They've included his daughter, Jessica and this woman from Glasgow who's seen him 26 times.
First-time filmmaker Julian Garciais working on a documentary about this phenomenon: women – and men, and children – who arrive hours early to Springsteen shows, praying they’ll win a wristband lottery to be in the pit – and maybe, just maybe, get pulled onstage.
"Oh, people think Bruce is going to look for the cutest girl – the best looking woman – in the front row – but that’s not really the case all the time," he says. "There’ve been plenty of middle aged women who maybe looked their best when Bruce was on a tour in 1978."
Quilantan says, yes, she looks good doing the Molly Ringwald - but that's just part of the case she lays out in a recent blog post called “Five Reasons Why Bruce Springsteen Should Pull Me Onstage at March Madness Festival.”
"Growing up in in Texas and being from up North, that's something I couldn't relate to with a lot of my peers," she tells me. "You know, there are Bruce Springsteen fans in Texas, but in the suburbs, you mostly hear a lot of Willie Nelson. I ended up turning a lot of my friends on to his records."
(It'll be her first time seeing Springsteen, though -- and the first time for her mom, who steeped her childhood in everything from Darkness On The Edge of Town to post-punk and new wave.)
Ultimately, Garcia says, it's about the connection between Springsteen and that destined fan - in the moment. But all the fans he's talked to who've made it onstage turn out to be legit.
"They know what they're talking about .... they're very aware of what Bruce is playing, when he's gonna play it. You have to be real."
When Vanessa and her mom arrive Sunday, there’ll be no wristband lottery – it’ll be first come, first served at the free Reunion Park show. Quilantan says she’ll be there, waiting.
And, if it happens, the 4-year-old version of herself glued to the TV will be “dying inside."
Listen for a Bruce Springsteen retrospective Sunday on our sister station,91.7 KXT. They’ll play a song from each of his studio albums every set starting at 9 am.
Check out Quilantan’s Twitter campaign: #princesainthedark.
