Holy Book of Mormon!!



Worth the wait?

Ten a.m. on Wednesday, February 27^th 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.


The Grand Waiting Area

\The Beleaguered Hall of Nations



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.