My Crazy Night

Last Thursday, July 24th, my friends and I went to see the band O.A.R. in concert. To be honest I was not too excited to see this because I only knew three or four songs by them. I agreed to go just because it was a beautiful night and the band was playing at my favorite outdoor venue, Charter One Pavilion at Northerly Island. I was expecting a nice and relaxing evening listening to good music, but I was in for a surprise. We got last row seats, because we bought the tickets a day before the concert. But the seats were fine, and we could see the stage perfectly. There was also an area behind us that we could stand on. When we stood there we could see what was happening outside of the venue as well, and that is what made our night very interesting. The concert was pretty good. Everyone seemed to be having a great time dancing and singing along to the songs. Of course I did not know any of the songs, but it was still nice to listen to them. The venue is right on a beach and as me and my friends turned around to look at the beach, we noticed something very odd. In the water there were a ton of boats docked right by the shoreline. We were wondering why so many boats were just sitting there and what they were doing. But we didn't worry about it too much, so we got back to listening to the concert. A few minutes later we saw a helicopter with a search light heading in our direction. Then we noticed it started to hover around the venue and the beach. We turned around to see what was going on, and it was crazy what we saw. Right outside of the beach there was a small food and drink shack. There were police barriers guarding the whole shack, and inside those barriers was what seemed like a group of around 700 people. The helicopter then moved over to the squished crowd of people, and basically just hovered and stayed over there. This seemed a lot more interesting than the concert, so my friends and I spent over half of the concert trying to figure out what was going on out there, because it was so unusual and strange. Next we saw a huge police car push the whole crowd from the food shack into the parking lot of the venue. Then after they were in the parking lot for a while, the crowd was pushed into an area covered in bushes, and then they just all disappeared. My friends and I really wanted to know what was going on out there. It was exciting to watch the whole fiasco, and we just wanted to know more about it. At that point we were not paying any attention to the concert and all of our focus was on the police scene. Soon enough though everything died down, and there really was not much left to look at. But before we turned away to watch the rest of the concert, we saw two people coming out of the food shack. It was a police officer dragging a teenage boy outside, and just placing him in the parking lot. Soon he disappeared as well, and there was nothing left to look at. We decided to watch the rest of the concert, and try to get our minds off of what just happened. Sure enough we started watching right when O.A.R. played all of the songs that we knew. What we saw of the concert was great; the band turned out to be good live, and we had fun singing along to the songs we knew. The performance soon was over, and we rushed out of the venue to beat the crowd. As we were going out we saw a few people crying, and we wondered if it had any relation to the incident we saw earlier that night. We could not wait to find out what went on at the beach, and we thought about it for the whole car ride home. The next day I looked through the newspaper to see if it explained what happened on the beach. Sure enough I found an article that explained it all. And to my surprise and dismay, it was nothing like I expected. It turned out that all of those people were on the beach to listen to the concert for free. A few fights broke out, so the police had to come and kick everyone off of the beach. That was not what I expected the story to be like at all, and I was a little disappointed. I missed over half of a decent concert just looking at people getting kicked out of a beach. Even so it was very fun to try and guess what was going on, though it turned out to be basically nothing. That night still turned out to be a lot of fun, but I still wish I had paid more attention to the nice concert.