tickets.
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When did it get so hard to go out and see a
show?
I went on-line to find tickets for a concert the other day. The show is still two and a half months away, but already the only seats left are all the way in the back, about a million miles from the stage. I guess the lesson here is that not only do I have to worry about scheduling time to go to the actual show, I have to keep track of when tickets go on sale so that I can be there at the computer, ready to pounce the very instant they appear. One of the things that attracted me to the Boston area was the promise of a thriving arts community. I happen to love theater, but I almost never go; it just requires too much planning and coordination. You can't just call up the day of the performance because the box office is only open for so many hours and you always get a recording. If you just chance it and go to the theater, there's a high probability it will be sold out; at the least, the seats will suck. On top of that, the theaters around here tend to be ancient, with seating that's less comfortable than the middle seat between two sumo wrestlers on a 737 from LAX to Newark. If I'm going to pay $70 or $80 bucks a pop, the least they could do is have seats that don't leave you crippled for life. I'm not the world's most dedicated fan of serious (i.e. classical) music, but I'd go out to the BSO occasionally if it were on the order of $15-20 and didn't require an RSVP three months in advance. I mean, people RSVP for weddings in less time than that. I suppose that's why you only see old people at the theater or the symphony...the ultra-wealthy few who had plenty left over after taxes and know they can't take it with them, and have enough time to kill to make the arrangements. Really, why would I pay for symphony tickets when I can just buy the CD five times over? And yeah, here and there you can ferret out cheap performances by less prestigious groups, but it requires such an active investment of time and is still so much of a crap shoot that it just isn't worth it. I'm not a sports fan, but I understand sports have gotten the same way. You can't just decide "It's a beautiful day, I think I'll go to a Red Sox game;" the whole season is sold out in advance. And those tickets aren't cheap either. Maybe that's why movies are so popular...compared to an $80 symphony ticket, a $10 movie ticket seems like a bargain. Of course, these days you even have to get movie tickets ahead of time, especially for 'event' movies. I guess maybe that's not the worst thing ever, except that now I have to endure those stupid adds with the paper-bag puppets before every movie I see. Fandango this, buddy. Entertainment just shouldn't be this hard. If I wanted this much hassle, I'd work on my taxes. |