Three things:
The Wiltern Theatre is an iconic music venue, and an architectural masterpiece. Along with the likes of the Pantages Theatre and Griffith Observatory, it represents Los Angeles in its 1930s art deco prime.
The bottom floor of the venue has removable seating, so some concerts can have seats on the orchestra level and some can open up the space for standing room only. When I was buying tickets for Bright Eyes, the ground floor was SRO, so I opted for the mezzanine. My rock-and-roll knees and my rock-and-roll lower back — even with my rock-and-roll orthopedic inserts — no longer allow me to stand in one place that long, and a Bright Eyes show isn’t going to have a mosh pit.
So I get a seat and a view — front row, baby — because the mezzanine is, I’d assume, a balcony.
But I’d never been upstairs at the Wiltern before, and it turns out that the mezzanine is the back half of the second floor, with the loge taking up ten or twelve rows in front of it, and an aisle running the width of the theatre between them.
This means that my front-row seat was actually perfect for viewing people using the aisle during the show, which seven thousand of them did.
Hi there! My name's GREG KNAUSS and I like to make things.
Some of those things are software (like Romantimatic), Web sites (like the Webby-nominated Metababy and The American People) and stories (for Web sites like Suck and Fray, print magazines like Worth and Macworld, and books like "Things I Learned About My Dad" and "Rainy Day Fun and Games for Toddler and Total Bastard").
My e-mail address is greg@eod.com. I'd love to hear from you!