I haven’t laughed so hard, I haven’t felt so good, as during and immediately after seeing the Broadway musical “Book of Mormon” on Friday night. Getting into the theater was an ordeal, but worthwhile.
The show is sold out into 2012, and I don’t have the desire to drop a month’s rent on the seats being resold on Craigslist and StubHub, so I got in line for the standing room tickets, which go on sale an hour before every show. But people had begun lining up at 4pm, two hours before I even got out of work, and so many people were ahead of me by the time I arrived at 7pm that the theater sold out before I got to the ticket window.
Then there appeared an angel in the form of an orange-shirted sort-of homeless-looking 6’4” man with a lisp who claimed to be getting his PhD in history from Rutgers University. Perhaps it was a vision of Moroni, the same Mormon angel who led Joseph Smith to a set of golden plates buried on a hill in his backyard that contained the Book of Mormon. He offered to sell me his two standing room tickets for $100, which he’d just purchased for $27 apiece. Knowing that other scalpers on Craigslist were trying to flip those same tickets for $250 on Craigslist, I said “Yes!”
We went to TDBank, I withdrew $100 and handed it over, and we parted ways satisfied shoppers. My mother had just arrived into Grand Central on the train from Connecticut. She couldn’t believe it: Her son had secured tickets to most-acclaimed musical in decades, the winner of nine Tony awards in 2011 and #4 on the Billboard Charts. She would be the envy of her friends. She would return to the suburbs and brag about her city-savvy son who wasn’t just surviving New York City, her buddy boy was conquering it.
Then I lost the tickets.
I’m not sure how it happened. If I did know, then they wouldn’t have been lost, I suppose. But I think they were stolen. Here’s the thing: while walking to the ATM, the homeless-looking Mormon angel was on his phone chatting about me and my purchase. Maybe it was his accomplice, getting a description of me and forming a plan for how to steal the tickets to resell them. But who knows? In any case, the tickets vanished at some point during the 5 seconds when I crossed from the north to the south side of 49th Street.
Distraught, my mother and I retraced my steps. We scavenged through the metal garbage can where I’d tossed a newspaper. We walked up and down the sidewalk, back and forth across the street. Then we begged.
“I think I was pickpocketed,” I told a police officer. “I had the tickets on one side of the street, and on the other side of the street I didn’t.”
“Tell the manager,” he said, and I did.
“Will they recognize you at the ticket booth?” asked the manager.
“Well, I didn’t actually buy the tickets myself, but from a scalper,” I said. “He was wearing an orange shirt.”
“If nobody shows up with your tickets, then I’ll take your word. What were the numbers?”
“111 and 112,” I said, doubting my memory.
One minute passed. Ten minutes passed. It was 8:05 pm and we could feel the excitement bubbling out of the theater that we should have already been inside. The manager approached us.
“OK, nobody has shown up with those ticket numbers. Here’s the deal, I’ll let you in on the condition that if somebody does show up with those tickets, you have to leave with no questions asked. No making a scene. Just leave quietly. OK?”
“Oh of course, yes of course,” my mother said, giving the man a hug. He looked at me. I nodded, wondering if I could really promise not to make a fuss about leaving if, halfway through the show, I was asked to leave. In that case, wouldn’t it be better not to see any of the show than to be embarrassingly escorted to the exit, humiliated and depressed and wondering how it all ended?
If anyone ever showed up with those tickets, the manager must have seated them elsewhere. After the intermission, my mother and I finally relaxed and stopped glancing anxiously at the door every time a person entered. Standing in the back of the orchestra, we saw Book of Mormon for one-tenth the price of the people seated directly in front of us. My mom and I both love a deal, and this one felt like winning the lottery.
And so it seems that the angel Moroni had led another soul to the Book of Mormon. Just as Moroni retreived the golden plates from Joseph Smith before any bystanders could witness them, so too, it seems, did Moroni take back the golden tickets to The Book of Mormon before they could be revealed at the gates to the theater.
Fortunately for me, and for Joseph Smith, some people are wiling to believe without seeing. Or they’re just nice. Smith lived and died by his Book of Mormon, and I haven’t stopped humming songs from that blessed Book of Mormon either.
