Necessary Roughness

This post brought to you by the letter “J” and the number “8.”

We went to Sesame Street Live yesterday at the Schottenstein Center of the Ohio State University campus. It was a pretty good show, and the kids enjoyed it. There were several adult tie-ins, accomplished by using old rock songs or putting new words to old. Unfortunately, I left my camera on the table, so you won’t get to see Bert as Tony Manero.

There was one Sesame Street character who a muppet monster dressed as a school girl but didn’t say much. Nobody knew her name, and the Wikipedia character list doesn’t have a description of what we saw. Grungetta, Oscar the Grouch’s girlfriend, walked without a trash can.

The single human, “Jenny,” lip-synced her tracks very well. Other than her makeup and the lighting making her face look really old on occasion, she sold the audience. Jenny was a new music teacher on Sesame Street. Her truck of musical instruments did not arrive, so the Sesame Street Muppets create instruments from their own possessions. Thus, the plot.

When we arrived at the show, people had occupied our seats and had tickets that showed our seats. My mother-in-law went to Guest Services to get it sorted out, which took nearly all of the first half of the show. Our tickets had been delivered incorrectly through the mail and showed up at the wrong house without our knowledge; my MIL had to call and reprint tickets. The other group got the tickets in the mail and showed up first in our seats.

It seemed to be an understandable error, except that the recipient of the tickets said that the tickets showed up in the mail, and she thought it was a gift! 14 tickets of floor seating addressed to someone other than you isn’t a gift. One would think trying to look up the recipient in the phone book would have been a worthy action. That family, which didn’t pay anything for tickets, still got to watch the show from the floor because the event manager put down an extra row of chairs for them. I would suspect that if it weren’t for the kids in that family, the event staff would have kicked them out of the building.

The “Schott” staff made things right by offering us front row tickets to “Smuckers Stars on Ice” in March. The manager and her staff treated me very well when I went off to look for my mother-in-law.