Last night, I went to see the band Creed play at Hershey Park with some friends. I don’t know this band very well – a few radio songs maybe but nothing really striking. Two of my friends, however, are huge fans, so I tagged along to the show.
While the concert didn’t really turn me into a fan (not the greatest singing in the world, and very masculine – this might have been the most masculine band I’ve ever seen), I did enjoy being outside on a nice night after a big thunderstorm. And I really enjoyed watching people.
Before the show even started, one man was taken away on a stretcher. He might have been having seizures; I wasn’t close enough to tell. What I could see is that when he first got “sick,” everyone in the seats around him jumped up and started waving for help. Suddenly, for a few minutes, humanity became community as the folks around this poor man reached out to help him when he couldn’t help himself.
As the show got going in earnest, I could hear these young men behind me singing at the top of their lungs. They were obviously huge fans, and it was truly wonderful to hear such enthusiasm in their voices. (When they started moshing and almost rolled into me, I might have been a little less laudatory, but still . . . ). So much of American culture seems to be about dampening excitement or about being cynical about the things we love, so it was really great to witness people truly excited.
But the show stopper for me was this older gentlemen, maybe in his 60s, down the lawn a bit. When Creed sang songs he knew, he stood up and danced, not gracefully or smoothly but with such energy and power that I couldn’t help but smile when I looked at him. He truly looked like he was glorying in the moment – hands overhead, body in motion, smile on his face.
As the show wrapped up, I noticed that the moon was glowing this beautiful orange over us. I would have totally missed that if I had been home in bed asleep. I would have missed all of this beautiful stuff if I had been home. Sometimes it’s in the most unexpected places that you see the most glorious things.