Shakespeare in the Park Lines — Page 11

Good morning! Managed to get a couple hours of sleep, nice to wake up here, its beautiful out!

As far as the condition of Central Park West, we walked by portions that were disgusting. Around where we were at 84th street it was clean as far as I saw, but up towards the front was pretty nasty.

We were btwn 82-83 and picked up our garbage, but it's true, as we walked in the sidewalk was pretty nasty. people left chairs, pillows,blankets and tons of trash after they left. Pretty sad..I guess common courtesy and sense are a dying art form...

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I would venture to guess that most of those people who left the mess behind are brokers or hired by brokers. They don't give a damn about the Public.

OMG!


This is sick!!!!


Broker Bastards

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I know...I guess it just never really ceases to amaze me.

I wish the police actually called some of those nbs and trap them...I know it's impossible...oh well..some people will have a load of fun with their karma! :)

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The Public Theater would benefit themselves in a lot of ways if they gave out tickets to summer supporters ($170 each), but then gave all remaining tickets to the virtual lottery (instead of making people wait in person)

(1) No more cleaning up the mess after people who camped out all night on Central Park West
(2) No more verbal abuses from people who waited all night and all morning & still didn't get tickets
(3) Less likely that scalpers would constantly get a large chunk of the tickets and re-sell them. There are about 300 posts on Craigslist from the past few days offering to sell tickets (scalpers, NYU students, etc)
(4) The "good feeling" that comes from realizing you didn't make hundreds of people spend their entire night & morning on line

Hopefully the Public Theater employees are sick of cleaning up all the mess on Central Park West, sick of dealing with people's verbal abuses, sick of monitoring the line all morning, etc etc. The virtual lottery solves all these problems.

But an all-virtual line adds other problems. The sad truth is that people don't value tickets won in a lottery as much, and very frequently don't even show up to get them. It makes it too painless. Plus their current system can't handle the traffic it gets now (of course, that can be fixed).

I do agree the system needs to be modified. Back in the day it didn't have to be an all day/night affair. They should go back to the old way.

And don't think for one second an all v/l would slow down the scalpers - it would probably help them.

If you do a raffle type lottery it could work. There wouldn't be any need to have a cutoff - at the appointed time (say, 10AM) you start handing out raffle tickets. You know the type, the little numbered tickets that come in pairs. You get one side, the other goes into a giant fishbowl. Everybody gets a ticket, there is no cutoff. You can hand out tickets until the drawing time. Say, noon or 1PM. Then they start drawing tickets out of the fishbowl (giant hopper, whatever). As soon as your ticket number is called you go up and claim your tickets for the show. As soon as all the seats are given out, that's it. Everybody else go home. If you handle it properly you can distribute all the available seats in under an hour.

And it doesn't matter if you get there at 1AM or 10AM, the only thing that matters is the number on the ticket you get. Totally random.

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Humbugfoto, that's probably a good system when there is a manageable group of people. However, when you have thousands of people like this past week, it becomes harder to manage. And that system, without having to wait, would probably encourage more people to show up because they could come down at lunchtime or on their way to work so why not take the chance. You could create bigger mobs that way. As it is, the staff rushes to get the tickets distributed fast and furiously because they have to get ready for the show that night. I did have a friend who worked at the Delacorte a couple of summers and he said that the ticket distribution is not all they are doing during the day so they do need to move it along so they can clean and stuff programs and do all the other stuff that needs to be done up there.

Why didn't they give out the tickets at the Public this year out of curiousity? It always ticks me off when people sell free tickets, off topic people were charging hundreds for the free Bon Jovi tickets last year on Craigs List.

Yes, it is just a lotto, but the randomness of it avoids the overnight camping out and hours and hours waiting.

And as I understand the type lotto you're talking about, you have to allot time for the people to pay for their tickets. With free tickets, that's one less step you have to take. The last time I was involved in a lotto the way I described it, they handed out 350 tickets (well, pairs of tickets, so 700 people) in about an hour. It requires a fair amount of staffing, I'll admit, but it worked seamlessly. One person to announce the number, and then five or six people to hand out the actual tickets. They called your raffle number, and said which station (numbered 1-6, or however many people you had available) you should proceed to, then handed the ticket to the person at that station. And then drew the next ticket. And so on. When (if) your number was called, you went to that station, they matched the ticket numbers and then handed you an envelope with your two tickets in it. There was a fair amount of venue security to keep people moving (and all the staffing in this case was volunteer).

The truth of the matter is, there's no one foolproof way to go about it. No matter what you do, how you structure it, people are going to complain about the outcome. And since waiting on line in the park is part of the experience, I don't think they're likely to change the system any time soon. Kind of a version of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

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Anyone know the dude's name?