Dear Friends

was a truly spectacular concert! Totally worth every cent and every minute spent on getting there. Like the rabid fans we are, all 3 of us arrived 3 hours early and proceeded to hang around in the warmth of a nearby building for 2 hours... and when we decided to go early to buy merchandise, we saw a queue which snaked around two sides of the building:



and if you look really hard you can see the police van in the background. PFWAH!

so we stood in line like the good singaporeans we are, hoping that we were in the correct queue. Super reminiscent of hello kitty la! Only this time we were freezing our bu our hands off, and we were super excited and buoyant. So when we finally got into the theatre, and finally paid money for the programmes and posters (damn i've descended into merchandise fandom):

THE MUSIC WAS SUPERB!

it flowed through me and grabbed my heart and swayed my soul. And that was just the bass. The choir singing in latin was awesomely eerie, and the flamenco music was really to-dance-to. Lots of rabid fans and standing ovations, in the intermission I saw Lulu and Sephiroth queuing up for an ATM, and a few Seed cadets around the place too. And then, like the true geek convention it was, I overheard someone complaining that Sephiroth had a katana -this long- but a handle only -this long-, so it was a one-handed katana, how ridiculous!

We were disappointed when we didn't see one winged angel in the programme, though, but the other songs couldn't have been more perfect. The crowd cheered (quickly muted) when the chocobo theme came on in the FF1-3 medley, and there were standing ovations to a few pieces (must be lots of Aeris fans out there). So when nobuo acceded to an encore and the first notes of One Winged Angel were played, the audience just went BALLISTIC. What an ending! And Marcus is a new FF convert. *grin*

Seven years of playing the games and listening to the music boiled down to one night of catharsis, one of the first few large scale concerts of game music in a major concert hall in the US. This was only the 2nd time Dear Friends had come to the US, and it came to CHICAGO. Lucky i am. Happy i am. Rabid Fan i am, now.