My Best Friend

Melissa Lopez, aka the homie, aka concert buddy. A little younger than me, born in August, Mexican, student at NYU, my best friend. We have a very similar taste in music and so it makes intuitive sense that we would go to concerts together. Our junior and senior years of high school brought us the tours of almost all of our favorite bands. My personal favorite was Onerepublic and Sara Bareilles at The Greek Theatre.

            The Greek is without a doubt the most aesthetically pleasing concert location in the Los Angeles area. It is not too big like the Hollywood Bowl, but it can still fit enough people to make one feel as if people are everywhere. The theatre is surrounded by trees and hills, which makes the acoustics amazing. In addition, from every seat I have ever sat at, I could clearly see the stage.

            Ill skip the horrendous traffic on the over an hour trip to the concert, we lived in Orange County, and head straight to the concert. By the time we got to our seats we had little time before Sara Bareilles, now known as SB, came out for her part of the concert. I really didn’t know what to expect. I heard her one song “Love Song” but aside from that I really wasn’t too aware of her music—I came for Onerepublic. She comes out already emotional at the size of the crowd. Sara is from LA so to see this size of crowd brought out some emotions. She opened with a song that neither of us were familiar with and we just nodded our heads because the tune was somewhat catchy. She then started singing some of her more popular songs and we began getting into it. To this day I will argue that she had the greatest voice I have ever heard live from a female. As one of her songs concluded and she played the piano with one hand holding a glass of wine, she sang “Mother F****** Douc****g.” Almost simultaneously we look at each other and say how much we want to be that MFD because that was one of the most graceful things we had ever heard. She sang so well that at points it sounded cleaner than her recorded tracks, and yet was louder than one would expect. The two of us stood amongst a crowd of sitting viewers singing what we knew and nodding our heads. She eventually ended the show to her song “King of Anything” where she convinced the crowd to sing the “Oh, Oh” part of the song. Then we just waited for Onerepublic and played 2048, a mobile app that was extremely popular at the time.

            It was excruciating, we were so close to seeing Onerepublic and yet it felt as if we had eternity left for them to perform. The thing you must know about Melissa is that she knows the words to every Onerepublic song. She is a pretty large fan so the anticipation was built faster than normal. As we are talking about how great Sara Bareilles was a cloth is rolled down and then the band began playing “Light It Up” the song they played at the beginning of every concert this tour because it made them feel like “rockstars.” We jumped up and I kid you not sang almost every word of every song for a little over an hour. We freaked out and frantically screamed as it turned out Gavin Degraw was at the show—we saw him about a week prior to this event so we were surprised to see he was still in town. At the end of the concert when everyone around us was just plain tired of how loud and excited we were for the show, a couple came up to us and gave us their backstage passes for a meet a greet. We sat. We couldn’t believe that some random strangers didn’t want to go to the meet and greet, let alone, give them to us. We looked at each other and figured that it was worth being out extremely past curfew.

            The thing about Melissa is that she always has my back. In any endeavor I took, I knew that I had one person supporting almost every action. We are literally a nineties boyband: N’ Sync. She can tell you what I am thinking and this is no lie. When I visited her in New York last year I gave her a band name and she could name at least 2/5 songs I was thinking of (many were obscure). Melissa will always be my best friend because we are too similar and too different not to get along. I mean let’s be honest, if someone can stand being in a car with my singing for over an hour I’m pretty lucky. Let alone twice for every concert we went to. Melissa Lopez, aka my best friend.