Wicked, the musical event of the century, came to Cleveland around Christmastime last year. If you are unfamiliar, the play is about the two witches from The Wizard of Oz becoming friends and having adventures and arguing and singing and it is quite a production.

Unfortunately, a decent ticket to Wicked costs roughly as many dollars as a month in Europe. Which is a bummer because my wife, Deserae, and I enjoy going to plays.*

*I should clarify that we actually would not enjoy most plays. For example, as I write this, the local theater is showing Yentl, a play about a girl who decides to cut her hair and dress as a male so she can live in secret and study the Talmud after her rabbi father dies. I feel comfortable assuming this not a play I would enjoy. Upcoming productions that we might also not enjoy include Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, Tyler Perry’s Hell Hath No Fury Like a Woman Scorned and Menopause: The Musical.

So you can imagine my delight when I came across an announcement about lottery tickets for Wicked. The deal is that you show up to the box office two hours before the show, put your name in a bowl and get a shot at one of the 24 front-row seats for the night’s production for $25! How can you beat that?! Making things even better, my office is across the street from the box office and I get out right when the drawing starts. Destiny!

Night of Destiny

So one Friday night, I headed to the box office to collect my front row tickets and win Husband of the Year. I joined maybe 20 other people who had entered for one of the 24 tickets. We were allowed to request up to two tickets, but most people had come with their group, so simple math would suggest that everyone present should walk away with a golden ticket. Armed with this knowledge, we all became fast friends.

The drawing started promptly at 6, and the cheery theater employee started going through the formality of picking every name in the bowl. Or so it would seem. Because as she picked names, the lobby cleared out one by one, until there was nobody left.

Except me.

I was bummed that I was the only person not to get a ticket that night, but not too bummed because I knew that I could just come back one night next week and claim Husband of the Year then. Then I heard a voice.

“Hey, did you not get a ticket?”

I turned around to see a man in his late thirties with an entourage of well-dressed, good-looking people surrounding him.

“No, I didn’t.”

“If you want, you can buy two off of me. We had great seats, but we won the lottery to upgrade to the front row. I’ll sell them to you for $25 each.”

As I took a second to consider the offer, he jumped in and reassured me. “They’re GREAT seats. They were really expensive.”

“OK, I’ll do it!” I gave him the money, he gave me the tickets, and we parted ways as great friends.

On the way home, I called Deserae to tell her to the good news. She was happy, but also a bit skeptical of the tickets.

“No,” I reassured her. “He said they’re GREAT seats.”

She asked for the row and section. I gave it to her.

After a pause, “These look like the seats that Abraham Lincoln got shot in.”

Hmmmm, I always secretly felt like those boxes way off to the side would be a terrible place to watch a play, but they would never put the President of the United States in bad seats, right?

Our seats.

“Hon, he said they’re GREAT seats. It’s fine.”

When I got home and took a closer look at my tickets, I finally discovered the truth. Stamped across the tickets in big, red letters were the words “LIMITED VIEW.”

Apparently, my new buddy had a much different definition of GREAT seats than everyone else (Except President Lincoln, RIP).

I walked inside and threw the tickets on the ground, angry that I had been duped, but even more angry that I did not really gain a new friend that day and that I had lost Husband of the Year.

At this point, we had two options:

1. Go to our LIMITED VIEW seats and try to enjoy the play and/or throw something at my new friend.
2. Swallow the $50, let the tickets go to waste and just get front row lottery tickets the next week.

Oh, well technically there was a third option, but it would be a ridiculous thing for a human being capable of feeling shame to do.

3. Drive back to the theater and become a scalper selling tickets outside of the box office. I’d also need to drag Deserae with me and dress up for a play in case the tickets didn’t sell and we’d have to sit in the Presidential Assassination section.

We chose Option C.

Option C

After driving back downtown through a snowstorm and parking, Deserae and I sat in the car for a second.

“So you’re going to call me if you’re not able to sell the tickets?” she asked.

“Yep.”

We sat there for another couple seconds.

“Please sell those tickets.”

I assured her that I would and walked toward the theater. As I approached a crowd waiting to cross the street, I realized that I had vastly underestimated how embarrassing it would be to keep my promise.

I walked to the middle of the crowd and meekly asked, “Does anybody need two tickets to Wicked?” Few people looked at me and nobody responded. Oh boy.

I guess that I was expecting that my dynamite sales skills would allow me to waltz up to the box office, join the group of scalpers and sell my tickets to the sold-out show in one to two minutes. When I approached the theater, however, I realized that maybe things would be a bit tougher than I imagined.

As I prepared for the night, I was picturing a scene similar to a Cleveland Indians game with dozens of scalpers selling tickets outside of the stadium. Even if you have tickets stapled to your forehead, you can’t walk ten feet without a crazy-eyed man popping up in front of you, asking if you need tickets.

This is not the case at Playhouse Square. Scalpers have long since determined that there aren’t a lot of well-dressed people walking by Playhouse Square at 8 p.m. in the snow who don’t have tickets to a show. So the good news was that the only other person competing for the crowd’s attention was a homeless-looking man in a boingy Santa playing saxophone Christmas carols.

I planted in front of the saxophone man, made eye contact with a crowd of people who all clearly had tickets for Wicked and asked, “Tickets for Wicked?”

Everyone looked away.

I kept repeating variations of this phrase, but everything ended up being more of a question than a sales pitch. The low point of the night came when I tried to shout “TICKETS!” but it came out, “Tickets?” and a lady showed me her tickets, assuming that I was some sort of lunatic asking people to show their tickets before they got to the show.

I’ve always felt pretty comfortable ignoring people on the street. Now, I couldn’t believe how many people were avoiding eye contact with me. And not only me, but also the saxophone guy! And he was great!

Somewhere along the way, urged on by a growing sense of dread that I would soon be sitting in the seats of a dead person, I got better at pitching my two tickets.

“Two tickets for Wicked! Biggest show in Cleveland! Sold out show tonight, folks!” (I actually said “folks.”) “Who wants to go to Wicked!  Two! Tickets! For Wicked!”

Nothing. Actually, I take that back, I did get a couple smiles of pity from old ladies. I counted those as wins.

Finally, after an undetermined amount of time (the clock said 20 minutes, but it was probably more like four to five hours), I called Deserae to let her know that these tickets were not going to sell and she should start trudging through the snow if she wanted to make it in time for the show.

“Really?” she asked.

Just then I spied a huge group of people. “TWO TICKETS FOR WICKED!!!”

“Ok ok ok, please stop, I’m coming.”

I tried to sell to a few more people, then, just as Deserae was approaching an angel appeared behind me.

“Well I can’t use two tickets…”

I spun around to see a largish young man.

“Oh, I can just sell you one! $50!”

He hemmed and hawed. Mostly he seemed worried about losing his serious theater street cred by going to a popular show (“I told myself I wasn’t going to see this. Unnnnnnnng.”), but eventually gave in and gave me $60 from the ATM. $60! He negotiated up for me!

I handed him the ticket and started walking toward Deserae who was doing a great job of making it clear to the crowd that she was not associated with the guy who had been yelling at them for the past 25 minutes.

But just as I had taken two steps away, he shouted, “Hey!”

My heart sank.

“Where are these seats?!”

“LIMITED VIEW” flashed in front of my eyes, as I briefly considered shouting, “All sales are final!” and sprinting away.

“Uh, um, they’re, uh, ya know, uhhhhhhhh…”

“Are these really good seats? They look like they could be really good seats! If they are, I might buy the other one off of you for my friends. Wait here!”

He consulted with the box office clerk while I marveled at what kind of angel this must be.

He returned apologetically. “Never mind, never mind, sorry dude,” and walked to the show.

I breathed a sigh of relief, grabbed my bride by the hand and walked past the saxophone player who was on “Jingle Bell Rock” for the second time in 20 minutes. Walking back to my car, I saw several homeless people I hadn’t noticed before. I offered them a smile and my remaining ticket as a gift. Nobody took me up on it.

I didn’t care. I may not have won Husband of the Year, but I had broken even, and sometimes that’s enough.

LIFE LESSON #6

Everyone can use a smile sometimes. Even crazy people shouting on the street.