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By Jonathan Wayne -- U2Station.com
One minute past nine o'clock, I fumble for my digital camera and frantically look around me in a momentary state of vertigo. I gaze 10 o'clock and see the extraterrestrial, Edge, hovering around on the left corner of the stage, picking the beginning of that fantastic opening song called City of Blinding Lights, but I don't see Bono. The next moment, red light comes streaming down from the roof and all of these other directions, like from a UFO, crisscrossing right into my face. I'm standing in the photo pit at a U2 Vertigo concert in Pittsburgh, PA, on a chilly and rainy October evening, awaiting for the show to start. Suddenly, I see a short figure dressed in black standing literally right in front of me (or maybe its 30 seconds later), and there I am trying to keep my digital camera from not magnetically wobbling in my hands. Streams of confetti are floating down from the dome-shaped roof onto my face and Bono has his head turned skyward, 47 inches from where I am standing. I look around me trying to get my bearings, hesitant in taking the first of hundreds of pictures. A couple of photojournalists scurry past me and I try to keep my sign in one place. I am the only person with a photo pass who actually has a ticket to the concert this evening. I even bring a slightly vain sign I've made that I am hoping to hold up in my brief stay in the photo pit next to the stage, but my first instinct is to snap that picture. SNAP.
Those first few moments when Bono magically materializes on the walkway like some alien and stands like a statue right in front of me is a moment suspended in time. FREEZE.