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| Worth the wait? |
Ten a.m. on Wednesday, February 27th was long circled
on many a Washingtonian’s calendar. That was the moment that tickets to The Book
of Mormon would be on sale exclusively to members of the Kennedy Center. I join
the Kennedy Center for one reason and one only—to have this priority status
when it comes to getting tickets. The minute the digital display read 10, I started
calling Instant Charge. The line was busy. I had my cell phone and land line
going at the same time, set on redials. My iPhone reports 81 attempts. My
friend who was doing online research reported that the website had crashed.
So, since it was my day off, I decided to put on my holy
underwear, say some prayers and hop in the car to go to the Kennedy Center box
office. When I got there the parking lot was full and one man was carrying a
large novel. Bad omens. When I got to the Box Office which seemed tame I had seen only the tip of the iceberg. I was
directed to the end of the line. The Kennedy Center is an extremely large space—I
had to go past the hundreds of people lined up in the Grand Foyer, hang a left at the Hall of Nations
and then go to the back of the line.
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| The Grand Waiting Area |
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| \The Beleaguered Hall of Nations |
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| Finally getting ahead |
You would have thought they were selling
tickets to the Second Coming. There were at least 300 people there. So I stood
in line patiently, barely aware of the beautiful setting I was in because I, like
everyone, had my chin to chest looking at my iPhone. Oh the suffering because of the website and phone crash! People who can afford $200 tickets having
to spend a couple of hours in line in the gorgeous Kennedy Center stirring up hell on the Twittesphere. I am
a twit at Twitter but I tried to Tweet that “tickets to Book of Mormon had
resulted wholly in war” but I messed up at the @ sign or the hash tag or something.
Well, at least I amused myself. Along
comes the girl with the cart full of concessions; apologizing for the fact that there was no
cafeteria open. I had M and M
peanuts for lunch. Seeing the Kennedy Bust brought some sign of hope, I had gotten out of the League
of Nations and into the long part of the L shaped line. Progress. Word filtered
down that there was a limit of four tickets for customers. Total time there --two and a half hours; total victory, four seats in the orchestra.
We in Washington are always several months if not years behind New York City
whether it’s the five dollar cupcake craze, the Harlem Shake, or the hottest ticket on
Broadway which will finally makes its way here after opening in April 2011. Clearly some of us are willing to wait.
