Nerdy Apple Bottom

I had the opportunity to go see Wicked. Twice.

The first time was the actual planned night. I went with three of the ladies from my book club. (I call them all my book club bitches.)

We met at Genghis Grill down in the Power & Light District. I didn’t love it as much as the regular ol’ Genghis Khan restaurants, but whatever. We were almost late to the actual production so we had to sort of run in from the restaurant to the Music Hall. I didn’t love that.

We walked in and they were already ringing the bells that mean “GET IN YOUR DAMN SEATS! IT’S ABOUT TO BEGIN!” Thus I didn’t have a chance to get Peanut a t-shirt at the merchandise stand. (I prefer to make my purchases before the show so I don’t have to stand in a line.) And even though we didn’t get the cheapest seats, our seats still sucked. And even though the sucked, there were still people sitting in them when we got there. So we had an usher kick them out. They weren’t thrilled.

The production was amazing. I would say it is second only to Lion King as far as performances that I have seen.

And because it was so good, I started to feel bad that I hadn’t brought Peanut. She had begged me to take her. Repeatedly. But even the crappy seats we had we expensive. Plus I thought of it as a Girls’ Night Out. Then I realized that all the girls would have been happy to have Peanut along.

Then I found out about a secret. Since Wicked doesn’t offer any discounted ticket sales, they hold a lottery. 2.5 hours before each performance they take names. You must be present. For 30 minutes they take names for the lottery. At 2 hours before the performance they draw names. If your name is drawn you can purchase up to 2 tickets for $25 cash each that are in the first 3 rows. The FIRST 3 ROWS. They sell 20 of them per show.

Peanut and I went down for a Sunday performance, put both our names in, and waited. There were quite a few people down there for it. More than there were tickets available, but not a huge line.

And we didn’t win. We were trying to decide if we’d stick around to buy the $40 tickets that are available to those that participated but didn’t win the lottery.

Then something really incredible happened.

One of the winners of the lottery came over and said that they’d had already seen the show before and would really like to let us buy their tickets. They said that Peanut looked so sad and they’d really like to do that for us. I teared up. Yep, I did. It was so sweet. Total strangers doing us a favor. A big favor. They’d been standing around waiting just as long as we had. They turned and walked off before we could get their names or addresses. I’d really liked to have done something nice in return.

We also had a parking attendant give us free parking, a Starbucks employee throw in some extra whipped cream, and MANY random pleasant conversations with absolute strangers. That whole day reaffirmed my faith in humanity. And I was really glad that Peanut was there with me too.

And to top it off, the show was so much more amazing being right up front. The costumes were so incredible. The musicians were right there. We even saw the lighting guy climb up into the rafters.