Shakespeare for the people (who can get up before dawn)

I really screwed up my sleep-cycle this time around. I should have known better, but I wanted to do a little "experiment": I had to catch the train to go to Frankfurt to get on the Air India flight to Newark at 4:20am, so I thought it might be better to just stay up until then and immediately be on NYC time by sleeping on the plane. WRONG. I DO NOT recommend this practice. It especially doesn't work if you get an aisle seat and you are a fetal-position sleeper like me, trying to curl into a ball without getting run over by the drink cart.

So, even though I was seriously sleep-deprived, I decided to try to get tickets to this year's Shakespeare in the Park offering-- 12th Night with Anne Hathaway. Jeremy and I never did this when we lived in NYC, and I managed to pick the year when it was most impossible to try. Apparently, most years you can go at 8 or 9 am, wait in line until they start giving out the tickets at 1pm, and everything is hunky-dory. My seasoned guide to Shakespeare in the Park, a friend of a friend named Chien (that rhymes!), had already tried unsuccessfully to get tickets 2 times this year before our joint attempt. This year was serious business.

We met in the Park at 6AM.

There were already about 450 people in line before us. By 7am at least 200 people were in line behind us.

I'll spare you the suspense, we DID NOT get tickets.

But, I actually had a great time. It was charming to be hanging out in the park so early, Chien was easy-going and a good conversationalist, I remembered to bring good snacks, Joy (who wasn't able to be in line) brought us lunch, and walking to the bathroom a few times took up a sizeable chunk of the 7 hours I was waiting.

A few impressions from the event:

1. Some people had air mattresses-- very smart because part of the line is on asphalt.
2. Lots of board games and people reading
3. There were some entire families waiting in line together-- the line was a beautiful cross-section of NYC, every age, ethnicity, and class-status was well represented
4. At 6:30 am there was a guy renting chairs to the line, but I never saw him after that.
5. There is a deli that delivers food to the line-- you tell the delivery guy "the big tree near the sign for the Sheep Meadow" or something and he rides his bike up and down the line calling your name.
6. You were only allowed to leave the line to get food from the cafe and to go to the bathroom-- both at the front of the line (I loved going to the bathroom because then I got to see what everyone was doing in line)
7. Chien and I are going to design an iPhone app. with secrets, charts, and useful info for doing Shakespeare in the Park: daily updated time the last person arrived to get a ticket, average sun exposure for different sections of the line, google map of the line, etc.

When they finally began handing out tickets, the last person to get one was there at 5:30. BUT there were at least 200 people in front of me who also didn't get tickets-- which means about 200 people joined the line between 5:30 and 6. Crazy!

The people at the front of the line were there at 11:30pm THE NIGHT BEFORE.

I hope next year they have a less popular actress...