“Why Aren’t They Letting That Guy in the Wheelchair In?”

by Drew Holmes

Summer was winding down and I was in the waning days of my time working at Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony. I was a Guide, which is a fancy name for “information desk attendant”, a job with an array of duties including selling tickets for the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra concerts.

The Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra is composed of conservatory students who are in the Berkshires to hone their craft with other up and coming musicians. Only the very best players are accepted for this prestigious festival, so the performances are always top quality.

These were not normal ticketed events like Boston Symphony concerts, so the BSO ticket office did not oversee them. The job of selling tickets fell to us, the guides, and with no official box office support, we were relegated to selling tickets at a folding table on the edge of the lawn at Ozawa Hall. With no credit card machine at our disposal, we were strictly cash only.

Tickets were cheap and seating unreserved, so the Darwinistic practice of first come first served was in play. This made perfect sense, as for a fraction of the usual cost you could have the best seats in the house. The borderline mob scenes at the gate for each of these concerts were a consequence of this excess value, which saw the bulk of the crowd arrive early and anxiously await the opening of the grounds.

One concert afternoon I was stationed at the table selling tickets. The gates opened and a crush of classical music aficionados rushed our position. The crowd was somewhat frantic, but polite, and we served each patron as quickly as possible.

Twenty minutes later the crowd had only grown. With the breakneck pace of ticket sales, we had stacked the cash on the table in front of us rather than take the extra time to use the cash lockbox. This proved to be a near fatal error.

In the midst of the pandemonium, a gentleman interrupted me mid-transaction and demanded “Why aren’t they letting that guy in the wheelchair in?”

Instantly my mind downshifted. Ozawa Hall was practically new. It had the latest in accessible amenities and could accommodate anyone who loved music, regardless of mobility. Were the ushers derelict in their duties? The gentleman was vaguely pointing to the other end of the hall, a good 30 or so yards away.

As I craned my neck to see the problem, I sensed something was amiss and placed my hand firmly atop the substantial stack of cash. Scanning the scene for the incident he described I saw no wheelchair, so I turned to ask the gentleman for clarification. He was gone. The truth was now clear — there was no problem. He had intended to distract me and help himself to some cash.

In “The Gift of Fear”, Gavin de Becker talks about trusting your gut when something does not seem right. Intuition is sometimes attuned to things our rational mind cannot explain. Rather than becoming paralyzed by (or worse, ignoring) this information, we need to use it and incorporate it into our decision making.

The gentleman thought he would come to the concert and leave with some extra cash. Fortunately, he was unsuccessful as a thief but successful as a teacher, as he gave me a valuable lesson in intuition and situational awareness.