In the fall of 10th grade, I attended a concert and did something beforehand that I will never forget. Many people know this story and I feel that it needs to be told because it characterizes the type of person I am. I like taking chances in life never fully knowing what the outcome will be, and in this case I definitely was not expecting what actually happened. I attended a concert with a couple of my friends and since we got to the venue early we just kind of relaxed and waited until the concert started, that is until we saw the VIP line for the meet and greet start to form. The concert was a Justin Bieber concert so there were girls everywhere and security for the most part was pretty strict. When we saw all these girls receive their blue wristbands for the meet and greet, we could just tell how excited they were and I wanted to be able to feel that also. Meet and greets for concerts like this are hundreds of dollars and I was just really happy that I would be going to this concert in the first place. When my friends and I saw the wristbands they looked like something we could make with construction paper and a crayon, this is when a light bulb went off in my head. What if we made our own wristbands and tried blending in with the crowd?
We took a while trying to figure out what we could use so that it would work, we tried gum wrappers, pamphlets from the venue, and just about everything that was in our site that could be ripped up and put on our wrists. We were just about to give up when I suggested that we should go and see what the drugstore down the street had, we took the 5 minute walk and when we got there we found a blue folder that was identical to the color of the actual wristband. This was it, this was what we were going to use! I bought the 53 cent folder, borrowed scissors, tape, and a marker from the store and wrote "Justin Bieber Meet&Greet" on the little strips of paper. Although it looked terrible and I didn't even know how to correctly make an "&" sign, we decided it would be worth a shot. Now by the time we got back to the venue, all the girls had already been admitted entrance into the room where the meet and greet was going to happen, this wasn't good. We knew the girls had been in there for a while so we had to come up with a story as to why we were late. When we approached the door we put on an act pretending like we were frantic because we thought it was "too late" to be allowed in. My friends and I all started to laugh because we just knew that it wasn't going to work and decided to just walk away. As soon as we walked away this random dad got a security guard and signaled for us to come back so that we could talk to them. We told the women that our mom had run home to get something and that we hoped we didn't miss out on the meet and greet. When she asked us if we received our wristbands, a million different thoughts were running through my head. Was this really going to work? Was a 53 cent folder actually going to pay for three people to meet Justin Bieber? We flashed her what was on our wrists and within a few seconds, she opened the door and we were allowed in.
At this moment in time, I couldn't believe what happened, we had to walk past another five security guards or so and they directed us up some stairs where the meet and greet was going to be held. There was still a long line of people and when we got up there we were brought to the end of the line to wait for what seemed to be forever. I was getting pretty nervous at this point and even googled "can you get arrested for sneeking into a meet and greet". I didn't know what would happen if we got caught, I was not about to have my ticket be taken away if this wasn't successful. I was starting to psych myself out but acted as calm as possible. A different friend of mine had actually won meet and greet tickets and since she had been in line for a while I figured I should send her a text. I asked her if they had cut her wristband off, if they scanned it, or if they thoroughly looked at it when she got to the front. She said I would be fine and that they didn't do anything along those lines, now all I had to do was hope for the best. We then heard a man say that everyone needed to get in groups of six because the concert was going to be starting soon. My two friends and I got in a group of six, but shortly after we heard "we need a group of three". We raised our hands and within seconds we were escorted to the front of the line where another group of 3 was. They were planning on having our two groups mend together into one big group of six. I didn't want to have a large group of people with us so I walked right past the other 3 girls and waited for the curtains to open where Justin Bieber had been standing. I walked in and couldn't believe what was actually happening. I stood right next to him (I eventually got to crop my friends out of the picture) and wished him good luck. It was all so rushed but I was in complete and utter shock. I couldn't wrap my mind around the idea that I had just paid 53 cents, 53 CENTS for three people to meet Justin Bieber. To this day it is one of the craziest things I have done and it reminds me that sometimes in life you have to take chances in order to achieve what you really want.
