Event Memory Prompt

10/28/2014

Write about a recurring public gathering you attended in a place you visited. It should be a very pleasant memory, and could be a baseball game or street fair, an outdoor concert or historical reenactment. Put yourself there by freewriting or clustering, allowing your mind to wander back. Write about the people you saw, the smells in the air. You’ll be amazed by how much you remember once you begin writing about it.

I remember going to a Dave Matthews Band concert when I was about 12 or so years old. It was at the outdoor arena located next to Hershey Park, I had previously been at this venue for an N'sync concert, which was also the first concert I had ever been to. That concert was full of over 30,000 screaming girls and was at the height of the group's popularity and while Justin Timberlake still had curly hair.

The DMB concert I attended was an entirely different affair. Firstly the genre was different, being more of a jam band than a boy band that sings pop music. There were also a lot less screaming screaming tweens in the crowd, being replaced by hippies and 20-40 somethings drinking beers and consuming elicit substances. I remember remarking about smelling something similar to a skunk's scent in the air and seeing a lot of smoke plumes wafting about in various locations of the crowd. I soon realized that this wasn't cigarette or cigar smoke and that there weren't any skunks around in the audience watching the enjoyable performance. It was marijuana... I was opposed to drugs because I had drank the kool-aid and believed what I was told about drugs being terrible and leading to people performing homosexual acts of prostitution under bridges and then dying young. Now I know that people can also perform sex acts in a variety of places, so I don't trust what I was told as a child anymore.