I was half asleep when I heard the first explosion. It all started when after waiting for what seemed to be forever, he finally walked onto the stage. Nationals Park Stadium was packed with people wanting to see him. The crowd cheered so loud that people three blocks away must have heard. Despite the fact that I couldn’t hear what he was saying, I still couldn’t believe that from only 30 rows away, Paul McCartney was picking up his guitar getting ready to play. When he turned on the microphone everyone got quiet to hear him. “Good evening Washington D.C.”! The microphone was so loud that people realized that they didn’t need to be quiet to hear, and started cheering again.
After a couple minutes of talking to the crowd, he finally started playing. The G chord rang out through the entire stadium. His first song was Eight Days a Week. It was hard to see him on the stage because everybody in front of me was standing up. I thought for a minute about what to do. I decided to ask my dad.
“Dad, I asked, I can’t see what should I do”?
“You can stand up on your chair”, he replied.
Once I stood up on my chair I could see a lot better.
My dad’s friend Ramsey came too with his daughter. My mom brought a friend too, but her seats were with Ramsey, away from us. Before Ramsey went to his seat, he gave me a box of glow sticks. I gave some to my brothers and used the rest for myself. I put the glow sticks together like a necklace and put them around my neck. My brothers saw me and tried to do it too. About halfway through the concert I got hungry.
“Mom can you get me a hot dog?” I asked
“Sure”, she replied.
My mom went into the stadium to find a hot dog stand. 15 minutes later she came back with a hot dog for me and cotton candy for my brothers. After eating their cotton candy, my brothers got really tired. They started to drift off The band started playing Live and Let Die. I didn’t know the song very well but I had heard it before. It was getting late I thought. It had to be at least 11:00. My brothers were asleep and I was really tired. I was starting to drift off when I heard the first explosion. I almost jumped out of my seat as the black sky was filled with a mixture of bright colors and a deafening BOOM. Both of my brothers bolted up to see what had happened.
“What was that”? I asked
“Look at the sky”, my dad replied, pointing up.
On the stage they had what seemed to be jets of fire. Another firework shot into the sky. The band played as fire shot out in all directions. I sat awestruck watching the different colors explode in the sky. I was barely listening to the music. I thought that it was loud before this song, but this was crazy. After the song, the sky slowly got darker as the jets turned off and the fire dimmed. Once we were all awake, Paul asked the audience if they had liked the fireworks. The crowd screamed yes in almost perfect unison. Paul pointed at his ear and shook his head.
“Too loud”, he said to the audience, with a smile on his face hinting sarcasm.
Everyone laughed at his remark and he started the next song.
Paul had been playing for almost three hours. My brothers were asleep now. I wondered how they could sleep with the music so loud. After Paul finished what he said would be the last song, he came back on for three encores! At the end, there were cannons behind the stage that shot out red, white, and blue confetti. There was so much of it that it rained red white and blue for almost 10 minutes. When the concert was over, it was almost 12:30 am. We all went back to the parking lot where our car was. It took us a while to get back because so many people were trying to leave at once. Once we got back to the car, we found Ramsey there with his daughter.
“She said it was too loud so we came back here for the second half”, Ramsey told us in response to our quizzical looks. Once we were all in the car, we started heading home. I was glad I finally had gotten to see Paul McCartney.