Sweet Melissa

On the night of Saturday 29th the normally peaceful Griffith Park in Hollywood exploded to the sounds of the awesome Melissa Etheridge rocking her heart out for nearly 3 hours. This lady sings my very soul not to mention, my life.

From childhood: "mama I'm strange...I'm just an accident"

To teenage years: "as you pray in your darkness for wings to set you free, you are bound to your silent legacy"

To angry young adult: "take a walk inside my shoes, a path I didn't choose, spend the night inside of my skin"

To an emerging realization: "there's no one to hear you might as well scream, they never woke up from the American dream, and they don't understand what they don't see, and they look through you and they look past me..."

To the first real love: "and when you make the choice to believe in your existence, with hello you will know when you find the one"

To an understanding of what you face: "Showers of your crimson blood seep into a nation, calling up a flood of narrow minds who legislate thinly veiled intolerance, bigotry and hate. We all gasp this can't happen here we're all much too civilized where can these monsters hide? But they are knocking on our front door, they're rocking in our cradles, they're preaching in our churches, and eating at our tables..." "10:03 on a Tuesday morning in the fall of an American dream a man is doing what he knows is right on flight 93... Even though he could not marry or teach your children in our schools, because who he wants to love is breaking your God's rules... Can you live with yourself in the land of the free and make him less of a hero than the other three?"

To a belief in what is right: "Marching to their drum with fear standing beside...Cause by cause they fight and one by one they lose...Rip through the wire that screens in my window, throw open the shade that covers my mind, I'm going to touch I've got to believe, the bell tolls for me... I want to testify..."

To the belief in me: "You tried to hold us down, you tried to hold us back, you tried to make us wrong, you tried to make us crack. You wanted to see us cry, you wanted to see us leave, you didn't count on the tide, you didn't count on the pride, you didn't count on me. I am a giant, and you will not make me fall, and you will not make me crawl. I am a giant, and I'm not alone, winds of change have blown, and walls come tumbling down. And I learned from my mistakes, pick myself up off the floor, I have learned just what it takes, now I am stronger than before; and we are standing side by side, we are determined now to win, we've come too far, and we've got the scares, and we are never going back into the shadows again..."

To a spiritual awakening: "Oh, people, c'mon tell me where is your Kingdom of Heaven? Where is your faith? Where do you put your fear? Do you have a price for truth and a price for believing, when heaven is here, heaven is here. My God is love, my God is peace, my God is you, and my God is me"

With Proposition 8 looming like a dark cloud on the horizon, I have to put my faith in the people of California that they will rise up against ignorance, fear, bigotry and hate and make the right choice.

(All quotes are lyrics of Melissa Etheridge)