On March 25, 2017 the pop punk band, Green Day, performed at the Peterson Event Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I was lucky enough to go. The venue was a basketball stadium. The stage came out a quarter of the way on the court. My seats were right underneath where a basket would be located. You could say that I was really close. The opening act was another pop punk band called Against Me

! They had a thirty minute long set. It was full of head banging and loud guitars. There was a thirty-minute break before Green Day would come on stage. I went to go walk around the venue. I ran into a few people from my school, which made me realize just how small the world can seem. It was nearing nine o’clock, which is when Green Day would start, so I went back to my seat. Before they came on stage, the sound people played Bohemian Rhapsody. Everyone was singing and dancing along. It gave off the feeling of togetherness. A sold out arena of people singing a song together. Green Day has a ritual they do before every concert. They send out the drummer, Tre Cool, in a pink bunny costume to get the crowd pumped up, which of course worked.

Suddenly blackness consumes us. All the lights are turned off and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly starts playing. Everyone is screaming, for we know Green Day is about to come on stage. Light. More screaming. My idols are up on stage. I was so close to them. I could see their facial expressions. They were all smiling and waving. And the drums. The concert was starting. In their opening song, they brought a fan up to sing. This happened two other times, once to sing again, another for a very luck girl to play guitar. She got to keep the guitar. The band has been a band for 30 years and they still had so much energy. I want to know where three forty year old men get so much energy. The lead singer, Billie Joe Armstrong, kept telling us that we were one of his all-time favorite crowds and that Pittsburgh is like Oakland, California, the city where he grew up. That made the crowd go crazy. I never in my life have seen so much fire and fireworks during and indoor concert either. During about every song you could see fire shooting up behind the drummer or fireworks shooting across the stage.

The set was almost two and a half hours long. The last two songs were acoustic, to slow things down a bit. At the end of the last song, red and white confetti shot out into the air and gracefully full to the ground. The whole band came onto the stage for a final goodbye, and with that, the concert was over. If you ever get a chance to go see Green Day in concert, take it. They are such a phenomenal band. So thank you Green Day for a great night.