Lewis Black is doing a one night performance out in Thousand Oaks on August 20 at the Fred Kavli Center. It's a very nice theater but it's pretty big. I wanted to get a batch of friends together and go but not if we were going to have to sit in the back row of the ninth balcony up where the air is thin.
Well, it turns out all the good seats were snatched up about eleven seconds after they went on sale. Since then, the only tix available for purchase have been way overpriced or way up in the stratosphere, usually the latter. In fact, even the overpriced good seats seem to have disappeared.
I just browsed a bunch of online ticket agencies and discovered, much to my amazement, that most of the seats they're offering are in Row H in the balcony. That is the absolute last row they have at the Kavli. Any farther back and you have to sit in the attic. For these, they're asking $175 (plus various fees) per seat. Which is especially outrageous when you go over to the Ticketmaster site and notice that they still have seats in Row D of that same balcony for the printed price of $47.50 plus fees.
What can we learn from this? That there are a lot of people on the Internet who are too dense to comparison-shop a bit? Does someone actually go to a ticket broker and pay four hundred smackers for a pair of seats without checking the main source first? Or is the broker just assuming that by mid-August, the $47.50 tickets will be long gone and he'll get the inflated price?
Row D of the balcony is still too far from Mr. Black to suit me. I think from now on when I see him, it'll be in Las Vegas. He's playing a number of dates there in the next few months and they all have good seats available…at a top price of $60 each.