,
31 tweets,
4 min read
Read on Twitter
This wonderful thing happened Saturday night that restored my faith in San Francisco. It happened on the sidewalk in front of Hamilton at the Orpheum Theater. Wanna hear about it? 
So, some backstory: my 9-year-old daughter sometimes plays this game, where she has me recite a line from Hamilton, and then she tries to correctly sing the line that comes after it.
Yesterday we‘re in SF with time to kill, so we go by the Orpheum, just to see the crowd. She decides that she wants to play the Hamilton lyric-trivia game with some *true fans*.
She pulls out her new pens she’s just bought with her allowance, and makes a sign:
(Yes, that’s a “miracle ticket” wish at the end. Hamilton tickets cost $$$$. I tell her there’s no chance. Can’t blame a girl for trying, though.)
We get there a half hour before curtain. There’s a lively crowd. I act as the “step-right-up” carnival barker. We find several enthusiastic contestants to play ‘Stump The 9-Year-Old Girl’! 👯♀️
People feed her Hamilton lyrics, and she’s killing it. Singing the next line immediately. Eliza, Lafayette, Reynolds, Burr, Jefferson - she knows all their parts. Other people try the game too. Lots of laughter and communion. Theater nerds are fun.
At about 6:55, five minutes before the show starts, a guy and his girlfriend walk up and read her sign. He gets a look in his eye.
“Can you do the beginning?” he asks, then starts singing: “How does a...”
She jumps right in. It goes down like this:
Afterwards, he asks “Are you seeing the show tonight?” When he learns we don’t have seats, he pulls out an extra ticket. IT’S IN ROW H.
It is literally a $425 ticket.
She can have it, he says. Free.
They offer to take care of her during the show and get her back safe. They seem 100% trustworthy. She doesn’t want to go without me, though.
So he holds out the ticket to her and says, “OK, then, here’s your job. You stay out here, and find someone who needs a free ticket, and give it to them. But make sure they’re *worthy*, OK? Can you do that?”
She nods. He hands her the ticket. He and his girlfriend go inside the Orpheum. Curtain is in 2 minutes.
We’re still reeling from how crazy this all is when we find a twentysomething woman near the box office on the sidewalk.
She is crying. Like, full-on sobbing, wiping away tears, can hardly speak.
It turns out she’d bought a ticket on a scalper website at 3pm for the show, but when they scanned it at the theater entrance, it wasn’t valid.
What the resale site had sold her (at 3pm, remember) was a ticket for that day’s 1pm matinee. 😡
She’s still holding the printout, which is useless. It must have cost her hundreds of dollars. She asks through tears if we happen to be selling an extra ticket.
My daughter lights up. “This is for you!” she says, pulling out the free ticket. “We just got it!”
The woman asks how she can pay us. “No, no, this guy just gave it to us!” my daughter says. “It’s free! Take it!”
The woman starts crying all over again. But this time, with tears of joy.
The show is starting, so we tell her to hurry and get inside. She says “thank you, thank you” the whole way in.
The door usher smiles. A woman with green hair and a chihuahua near us on Market Street pipes up. She’s just watched the whole thing go down. “That was incredible,” she says.
She’s right. It was.
So we walk back to our car... and I realize three fundamental truths at the exact same time:
1) Ticket resale sites are bloodsucking vultures, may they burn in hell
2) This city might be hopelessly impacted by tech wealth and obscene inequity, but small, amazing things still happen in San Francisco.
3) People are still generally good. This guy’s name was Bradford. If you know him: buy him a drink for making someone’s day! 🍺
