Urie Mendoza
It is 1 pm, I’m walking toward Wooden Spoon on Market Street, and the streets of the Duboce neighborhood are brimming with fit people wearing shades, shorts, and tank tops. It’s a hot afternoon in San Francisco, and more precisely a hot Saturday afternoon in downtown San Francisco, which means one is either at brunch or at the gym. I see my friend Urie waiting for me in the shade, sporting an exquisite outfit.
“I like the jumpsuit!” I say.
“Thank you,” he replies nonchalantly. “I was thinking what look I could serve for you today, and I decided to go with this.”
Urie and I met in January last year when we both joined the same dodgeball team. While he has been playing ever since, I lasted for barely three months and realized, once and for all, that group sports would never be my thing. But the two of us stayed in touch.
I learned that he was opinionated about music, so when Rina Sawayama came to San Francisco last year, I asked if he was interested in going with me. He later invited me to see Grace Jones. A little bit before that, I invited him to see Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul together. In July, he invited me to see Sky Ferreira together. We started hanging out more, and I now take pride in the fact that I managed to make a friend in my thirties.
We’re at Wooden Spoon because brunch is Urie’s favorite time of the day, and because this place was the first spot he fell in love with after moving to San Francisco. He got to know one of the staff members, who is very into astrology and who’s done a few readings of his birth chart for him. We start chatting, and while Urie is reconstructing his life story for me, I notice that the two guys sitting next to us have barely said a word to each other and are attentively eavesdropping.
It’s a great life story to eavesdrop on. Urie was raised in Simi Valley, a small Ventura County city in the greater LA region. Described by Urie as “suburban life, cops, and Ronald Reagan,” the seemingly unassuming Simi Valley is at the nexus of some of California’s darker moments. Rodney King trials were moved from LA County to Simi Valley back in the nineties. The city itself is very close to Simi Hills, the original location of the Spahn Ranch, where the Manson family headquartered their cult in the sixties. And the fictional Spahn Ranch in Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood is actually the Corriganville Movie Ranch in Simi Valley.
“Simi Valley is sort of the dark shadow of LA,” he tells me, “and it is a little conservative spot, but there were some cool things about growing up there. Simi Valley was full of these old film and TV sets that were no longer used, like from Star Trek, and we were able to just go and play there. I was neighbors with Amanda Bynes at some point.”
In the classic American way, Urie himself is a melting pot of cultures. His dad is Mexican and his mom is Filipina. They met at a Mexican restaurant in Simi Valley where his dad was a chef and his mom worked as a server. On their first date, his mom requested that they go get burgers because she was tired of Mexican food, which Urie’s dad took as an opportunity to subvert expectations, so he made the burger at the restaurant instead.
I am interested to know how we got from this scenic childhood in a right-leaning pocket of LA to the strong-willed, consummate liberal city boy that Urie is today. “Oh, I was always out there,” he says. “I was already involved politically as a teenager. I helped lobby for the bill that allowed mental health services to LGBT youth who were younger than sixteen. I also helped lobby for the Harvey Milk Day.”
The narrative checks out. Urie is one of those straight shooter friends that you meet in your thirties who—unlike your childhood or college friends—didn’t have to deal with the BS of continuously listening to your bizarre, deeply-rooted opinions. So, one night, when I was going on a tirade for the umpteenth time about Arca being an overrated artist, Urie looked at me and went, “Okay, you know what, Denis. I think you’re a closeted Arca fan.” I scoffed at the idea and then found myself, a few months down the line, texting Urie to tell him that I had purchased an Arca album at a record shop and that I had accepted myself as an Arca fan. “Of course you are,” he replied.
It’s also fitting that Urie works in event production. My sample size is small, but all the people I’ve met in this line of work are typically direct, quick on their feet, and don’t like to waste anyone’s time. Probably because there’s always so much at stake and so little time to pull it off.
“A lot of people think events are easy,” he tells me, “because, at the end of the day, what people want is to have good food, to have good music, and to have a good time. But behind all of that, what you’re really doing is risk mitigation. When I am producing an event, what I am really thinking is, ‘How do I design this so that if things go off the rails, they go off the rails as little as possible.’”
This lurking pressure can actually break people. “I mean, some people go nuts,” he adds. “You always have to be able to improvise when it comes to producing events. And some people can really freak out when things don’t go the way they should.”
It never occurred to me before how vastly different a worst case scenario is for someone like me, working an office job, and for someone like Urie, who has to deal with the unpredictability of human behavior. My biggest fear is that I build a data model or an analysis that’s completely inaccurate and ends up costing the business a lot of money. Urie’s biggest fear is that there is a shooting at his event.
He tells me he’s had nightmares about it on several occasions. “I think it’s just very easy to go down a spiral when you start thinking about this. Like, what if I produce something, what if I create something that ends up killing someone? No one wants a Travis Scott situation.”
In what’s now become the typical rhythm of our conversations, we somehow shift from the topic of work to arguing about music, this time about Beyoncé and her speaking style. We both take it as a sign that it’s time for our next stop: Amoeba Records. It’s a spot in Haight-Ashbury that both of us love, and Urie specifically wants to see if he can find a Shania Twain record. And I cannot wait to stress him out by asking the toughest question one can ask a music nerd: what are his favorite albums of all time?
At Amoeba, while he is perusing the rock section, I ask Urie what his top five albums are. This indeed proves to be a difficult exercise, so after ten minutes, I allow him to expand the selection to top ten music albums. He comes up with the final ten contenders, but then takes my notepad and asks me to scratch a few because he remembered a few more records that he loves. He’s happy with the final list, though I wonder just how final this list is. I get my answer tomorrow, when he texts me in the morning, saying that he thought more about the list and that he had some amendments to make.
Urie’s final final list of top ten music albums, ordered in alphabetical order of the artist’s name:
Amy Winehouse — Back to Black
Britney Spears — Blackout
Hedwig and the Angry Inch — Soundtrack
Kanye West — My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Lady Gaga — Born This Way
No Doubt — Tragic Kingdom
Rihanna — Anti
The Smiths — Hatful of Hollow
The Strokes — Is This It
The Weeknd — After Hours
But when I ask him if he has a list of the most overrated albums, he gives a firm, unequivocal answer—Taylor Swift’s Red. He makes a disclaimer though that he can only say this because he is a fan. “She just has better albums,” he clarifies. “That’s all I can say about that.”
He can’t find his Shania Twain record, so he ends up getting Exile on Mainstream by Matchbox Twenty, and we leave the shop to go north, up to Sutro Baths. As we drive through the Richmond neighborhood, Karl the Fog starts rising in the distance and I ask myself why I still have not learned that one never wears just shorts and t-shirt in San Francisco.
The vibe up in Sutro Baths is Hitchcockian. Waves are splashing against the massive beach rocks, the sky is gray, and there are way too many birds. Urie and I are walking carefully on the skinny ledges of the bath ruins when we spot a dead seagull in the algae-infested bath waters.
One thing Urie and I haven’t chatted about yet is the fact that he actually spent most of his twenties not in California, but in New York. It’s where he finished college. It’s where he cut his teeth in event production. In total, he lived there for eight years. And, some of his experiences during those eight years read like a Hollywood movie script.
His last semester of college, he started working as a production assistant for The Dr. Oz Show, then served tables at Danny Meyer’s and Ed Schoenfeld’s restaurants (if you’re as unknowledgeable about food as I am, here’s a quick cheat sheet: Danny Meyer = guy who founded Shake Shack, Ed Schoenfled = guy who founded RedFarm), then started as a concierge at Soho House and eventually landed an events role there.
Cool stories abound. He served Paul McCartney, Sofia Coppola, Frances McDormand, and Charlize Theron when he worked at RedFarm. Theron, in particular, remains a favorite memory. “It was 2018, and she came in with her kids,” he recalls, “and it was really nice seeing a star like her in a real, vulnerable setting. I knew we needed to get something to keep the kids calm, so I asked her if we should get them some rice while she decided on food. She was very thankful. It was funny, at some point, one of the kids was being really hyperactive, and she just went, ‘Stop it! You’re embarrassing me.’” The experience left an impact on him. Now, if he hears Theron is starring in a movie, he makes sure to go see it.
Stories became glamorous when he started working at Soho house. “Suddenly,” he says, “all I had to do was show that I worked at Soho house, and I could get into any club.” He booked artists like Lil’ Kim and St. Vincent and DMC. Stories also got ridiculous when he started working at Soho house. He was questioned by the FBI because one of his coworkers turned out to be a criminal who was embezzling money. At one point, he had a coworker by the name of Candy Valentine who turned out to be an escort for former rock stars.
“Okay,” I ask him, “so how would you describe your life in New York after all that?”
I get what’s probably the most succinct and accurate depiction of being a twentysomething in the concrete jungle. “Uh, New York,” he smiles, “I mean, you leave your apartment at 3pm and come back at 4am.”
“So, you partied a lot?” I ask him.
“Oh, yeah.”
A common denominator across the transplants who eventually leave New York is that they all come to the same realization, which is that the city might be a metropolis, but that it’s actually a village. “I knew exactly when I realized New York was really small,” he tells me, “and that was on a Wednesday night, when I went to karaoke and saw two guys that I had separately slept with singing ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ together on stage.”
He tells me that moving to San Francisco was probably the best thing that happened to him because it forced him to not seek external validation and to instead love himself. But it was actually never his plan to end up in the Bay Area. The first summer of the Covid-19 pandemic, Urie felt that he needed to leave New York and go back to California, to mend his strained family relationships.
When that experience didn’t go as expected (I think the best description of his family affairs is “complicated,” in every sense of the word), he ended up north, in Los Gatos, with his godmother to get some distance from everyone.
“I thought, what do I do? Do I go down to LA again? Do I try New York again? And then, I thought, ‘Okay, you know what. I’ll just go to San Francisco.’”
Neither easy nor planned, the move coincided with a flurry of inner emotional turmoil. The pandemic rendered San Francisco desolate, which was already hard enough, but Urie also had the tough task of starting all over in San Francisco and having to build a completely new social circle. Compounded by losing his grandpa in the pandemic, the whole experience became a lot to handle.
“I just wasn’t loving myself,” he says.
What I don’t think Urie saw back then—or sees even today—is that he is so quintessentially American, and, even more importantly, so quintessentially Californian. As I listen to his story, from broken family structures to his untiring hustling and grinding to get what he wanted, it becomes clear that he embodies the unwritten ethos of the golden state. That, at any moment, in whatever circumstance you find yourself in, and no matter how hard you have failed, you never give up. Instead, you rebrand and you start all over. Which he did. He found a new chosen family in San Francisco, found his footing in the tech industry, and kept doing what he loved: creating experiences.
It’s now 6 pm. We’ve left the Sutro Baths and we are driving over to Last Rites, Urie’s favorite tiki bar in the city, which happens to be a favorite of mine as well. I’m shocked that there is already a line to get in, but Leo, the charming guy working the door, informs us that we are actually too early and that the staff is still getting the bar ready. It occurs to me then that I’ve never waited in line for a bar to open, and that—despite having been at Last Rites so many times—Urie has somehow turned a routine I know too well into a first-time experience.
“I love coming here,” he tells me later as we sip our drinks, “because, whenever you’re having a bad day, you come here and see all this, and you realize there is no point in taking life so seriously anymore. I love that I’m taken to another place.”
He’s right. I have always felt the same about this place. There is something reassuring about finding a seat here with a friend on a low-key night, retreating in dim-lit corners encircled by the canopy, and listening to the sounds of thunder crawl through the airplane wreckage. Dreamy is maybe the right term.
I ask Urie what his dream is. He did Soho House. Last year, he did an event at the Super Bowl. He’ll now be doing Dreamforce in San Francisco and CES in Las Vegas. What does one even do after hitting all these milestones?
“There is one thing I’ve always wanted to do,” he answers. “I have always wanted to book my own festival and curate the entire lineup.”
I want to make a witty joke about his lineup consisting of artists I wouldn’t care for, but I quickly realize the joke would never stand a chance because I am well too aware that any festival curated by Urie Mendoza would be one for the books.
