Front of House: Observations from a Decade on the Aisle Read Online Free PDF

dislodged their hands, wriggled out of their grasp, and backed up.
    At some shows I was groped. I sometimes had to contend with very grabby old men who inexplicably thought that I was going to be overjoyed by their attentions. I finally started putting my hand up in a “stop” gesture and stepping back when these octopus-like patrons approached me and extended their tentacles. I learned to tell them straight out, “I’ll be happy to help you, but please don’t touch me.” Outside of the theater, I would have told them to get the hell away from me and probably would have considered kicking them in the shins; at work I had to find ways to deal with it professionally and peacefully.
    It still irks me that I had to deal with it, though.
    On other occasions male patrons referred to me in ways that were clearly meant to be insulting, such as “girl.” At Phantom one evening, I tried to stop a couple from taking their drinks to their seats. They told me that “my supervisor” behind the bar had told them it was fine. Knowing that none of my supervisors happened to work behind a bar, I politely told the couple that regardless of what the bartender had told them, he wasn’t in charge, and they couldn’t take their drinks in. The man shook his finger in my face and snapped, “You need to talk to your boss, and you have a lot to learn, young lady.”
    Every now and then I even encountered patrons who thought that I was going to babysit their children during the show. They’d bring them to wherever I was stationed and say, “This nice lady will watch you.” Again, I doubt they would have done the same with a male usher. They were always very disgruntled when I told them that I couldn’t babysit and that their children needed to stay with them, in their immediate vicinity, at all times.
    And so on. And so forth. Ad nauseam.
    Can I say one more thing about this issue? There’s no such thing as an usherette. “Ette” is a diminutive, and female ushers aren’t lesser beings. Both men and women are ushers, plain and simple.

Schooled on Schoolkids

    There were three words I always dreaded hearing when I was ushering: “We’re all together.” The phrase was usually uttered by the leader of a large party of schoolchildren or a tour group, none of whom intended to show us their tickets or sit in the correct seats.
    Cats, Phantom, Les Misérables and Miss Saigon all attracted a lot of kids; at some Wednesday matinees students occupied more than half the seats in the building. Many productions, especially the large musicals, had full educational outreach programs with study guides, workbooks, plot summaries, fact sheets, and other material to supplement teachers’ own preparations. Sometimes students who attended matinees were able to stick around after the performance for question-and-answer sessions with the actors or stage managers.
    For some schools Broadway was just another field trip; for others, it was the highlight of the academic year. Many student groups came from the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut tri-state area; others traveled longer distances. They changed with the seasons. In the summer the day camps came in. At Thanksgiving, the big musicals always got the members of the high school marching bands and color guards that performed in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The kids usually proudly wore their red parade “cast member” jackets and carried special duffel bags with the Macy’s logo.
    Unfortunately, many student groups failed to understand that they didn’t actually have the entire theater to themselves, so they really couldn’t sit wherever they pleased. Dealing with this could be an absolute nightmare. At Wednesday matinees we often had four or five different groups from different schools doing kangaroo hops around the mezzanine. And of course, when they ended up in someone else’s seats, it became a nightmare when those ticket holders actually showed up. We often spent the entire walk-in