The tale of the highway to Hell

BY PETUNIA PAP SMEAR

The road to Hell is fraught with danger and excitement.

Many moons ago, eleven moons to be exact, I was lying on the sofa, watching the finals of “The Great British Baking Show.” Of course, the delectable delights they were baking were making my salivary glands work overtime. I was constantly needing to wipe the drool off my chin with a large beach towel because a drool bucket was just so last year’s fashion. Between wipes, a commercial for Broadway at the Eccles came on the TV. I got a wild hair and decided that I needed to broaden my horizons and inject a little more culture into life between the breasticles.

Hence, I winched my gargantuan bottomus maximus up off the couch with the engine hoist that I keep beside the coffee table for just such occasions. Now, before you go thinking that my living room lacks the level of artistry and sophistication necessary for a mullet convention, of course, I bedazzled the hoist with about 20 pounds of rhinestones. Then, I wrapped a green plastic vine around the beams and viola, a beautiful and magical yet useful piece of furniture, worthy of any queen’s throne room.

Consequently, I trundled downstairs (note, this time I did not fall or roll down the stairs) to my computer and looked up the Eccles box office, and purchased tickets for “Hadestown.” The site said that I would receive an email sometime within the next month from which I could just display the QR code at the theater or I could print the tickets myself on my printer. Well, I’m an old queen with old habits. It’s uncomfortable for me to not have a paper ticket in my purse. Therefore, I took a screenshot of the order screen, showing my purchase, and printed that out at least.

So, every morning when I would get on the computer to post my daily Pearl of Not-So-Great Price, I would also check my email inbox, searching for the tickets. After a few weeks, I never saw it in my inbox. Eventually, I got all caught up in the preparations for the monthly bingos and forgot about it.

Fast forward to last week, when I happened to look in the calendar on my phone and realized that the performance was only one week away. Great Glitter God, I’d better find the tickets. So, I began scrolling through hundreds and hundreds of old e-mails searching with my aging eyes, subject lines like “dump truck loads of glitter,” and “industrial strength bras.” Which, I might say is rather difficult when you must look through pounds of glittery eyeliner and globs of clumpy mascara.

Then I typed in various search words, hoping against hope that it would be found. No such luck. Next, I got out the paper copy of the screenshot that I had made, looking for some clues. No dice. So, I thought, I shall go directly to the source, I drove to the Eccles theater and went to the box office so I could speak to a real person. I boldly produced my screenshot paper of the purchase, confident that they would be able to quickly produce my tickets. Alas, No! They looked at the paper and told me that it was from a third-party ticket seller, they were not involved, and they could do nothing to help me. WELL, SHIT!!!

I quickly returned to Chateau Pap Smear and frantically began to search for the contact information for the ticket seller. They were very clever in the design of their website. It was indistinguishable from the real, actual ticket office. I clicked the contact us link and it opened an email. I asked for help and sent it. I quickly dove headfirst down the rabbit hole of automated responses with answers to frequently asked questions. This was no help at all. Next, I called the phone number and got put into a phone cue, with the most annoying music blasting (definitely not suitable for party fowls). I listened to that horrible dribble for an hour and a half and then an automated voice said they would call me back and it hung up on me. Despair began to set in.

I was at my wit’s end. It was now Saturday evening, and the show was the Sunday matinee, only 17 hours away. I was at the verge of surrendering to the internet demons and just accept the fact that I was not going to be able to see the show, and chock this all up to being a very expensive lesson learned about third-party ticket sellers when my phone rang.

“This is Michael with *%$S# Tickets.” My heart leapt into my throat. Partially because it was a real person that I could talk to, but also because his voice sounded so dreamy. I could just tell that he was uber cute. He explained that he was returning my call and would try to help me. He tried several different things, which didn’t work. Finally, he ended up calling the theater himself and after about 55 minutes (which I spent imagining what Michael was wearing) he finally worked out my ticket issue, and I received a ticket email in my inbox. Victory! The real tragedy of this story is that after all these ticket travails, I didn’t like the show AND I didn’t get a date with Michael.

Like always, these events leave us with several eternal questions:

1. Should I design a bedazzled line of engine hoists for the gravity-enhanced queen?

2. Should I call it Petunia’s Wench Winch?

3. If I had threatened to throw glitter into the Eccles ticket office, would I have received a quicker result?

4. Should I install glitter cannons into my breasticles for just such occasions?

These and other important questions to be answered in future chapters of: The Perils of Petunia Pap-Smear.