I encounter these people at nearly every show I attend. Most recently, it was the bespectacled man that Tom mentioned in his post at a Sunday matinee of
Good People. The security guard at the Friedman actually asked him to leave, because several patrons had complained about him harassing them for tickets. Needless to say, he didn't, and continued to pester people until the doors were opened.
Sometimes, of course, they're looking to get a free ticket to sell. I've seen this many times at places like Encores and Shakespeare in the Park. One guy managed to snag a ticket to
Hair, back when you couldn't get near the show, walk out to 81st and CPW, and sell it for something like $100. And this phenomenon isn't limited to just Broadway. The Met has its own legion of unhinged beggars always looking for a way in. Many of them stand outside at intermission and try to beg tickets off of exiting patrons. I can't tell you how many times I've gone outside to have a smoke or get a breath of fresh air at an intermission break and been descended upon.
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body