Observations in the mezzanine

I have a characteristic which separates me from my peers. When I am holding a ticket with an assigned seat number, I sit in the seat enumerated thereupon.

This establishes me as sadly parochial and unimaginative, I think. Seating charts have become just the most recent casualty in our modern battle for territorial supremacy. I have been seeing my seat number as an aid to peace, utility, and order, as a convenience. I should view my ticket rather as the pen with which to offer my challenge. I should enter the theatre and select any seat I fancy, a sort of cultural squatter’s rights, or droit de seigneur. I should take up arms against a sea of troubles…

no, that one’s suicide.
Surely Shakespeare has a role model for me, somewhere.

Ah. Twelfth Night.

'Youth, whatsoever thou art, thou art but a scurvy fellow.'

'Wonder not, nor admire not in thy mind,why I do call thee so, for I will show thee no reason for't.'

THAT’S the strategy I will embrace. I shall be Sir Andrew.

And, as Sir Andrew, I will sit mulishly in my seat at the ballet, while two middle-aged women in appropriate dress stand, fettered by their civility, attempting to convince me to vacate my new seat so that they can sit together, as originally planned.

Perhaps I will talk on my cell phone while doing it.

When arts organizations are attempting to broaden their base of support, do you suppose they ever consider such collateral damage? Do they say to themselves,

“Gee, we’d really like to reach out to people who don’t usually support the ballet. Sure, we’re taking a risk that half the people in the building won’t understand details like having private conversations in a whisper, but hey, it’s money.”

I suppose we see the same kind of problems at sporting events. People have always climbed down from the nosebleed seats during baseball games, for example. But my impression has been that when the guy with the ticket showed up, you grabbed your cap and ran for greener pastures. Maybe it’s all in the assessment of the owner you’re supplanting. If baseball ticket holders more often looked like ballet attendees, maybe the situation in the stadium would be collapsing as fast.

I tend to think, though, that part of the problem is money. There is a beautiful inverse slope in the relationship of perceived necessity and entitlement. If an experience is free, only minimal shoving and pushing is necessary to defend it. The greater the expense, the more making it a peak experience is essential to your “amour propre”. The expense, however, would have to be charted against, say, wages per hour. Ballet tickets aren’t the same to everyone. This, by the way, explains why people seem to be convinced that all theatre experiences require standing ovations. Since theatre is COMPLETELY a luxury, now that we can watch “reality” TV 24/7, the fact that you’ve plunked down wages on it must mean it’s wonderful.

I should mention Thorstein Veblen on this.

“The canon of expensiveness also affects our taste in such a way as to inextricably blend the marks of expensiveness, in our appreciation, with the beautiful features of the object, and to subsume the resultant effect under the head of an appreciation of beauty simply.”

I’m not willing to endorse such a highly subjective version of the merits of art, but I can certainly agree with it as a component.

Doesn’t really solve this seating problem, though. Maybe it’s a Second Amendment issue.