Those who know me know that I have a sometimes unhealthy need to follow instructions. The Ravinia Festival website said tickets for 2025 season concerts would go on sale at 8:00 am, which I took at face value. DUMB!

I didn’t find out until I logged in age 8:00 that you could get in the queue at 6:30. OOPS!

Needless to say, but I will anyway, there were a few people in line ahead of me, actually over 25 THOUSAND!

I use the term people loosely, as I’m sure many of them were secondary sellers (either living, breathing ones or sentient bots), which sounds much kinder, though it shouldn’t, than scalpers. (Interestingly, the term scalper is said to have arisen in the 19th century, as applied to railroad ticket brokers who sold tickets for rates LOWER(!) than face value.)

Rest assured, that is no longer the case, though I must add that I once got a nice price for a Boston Celtics game in the final year of the old Boston Garden by waiting until after the tipoff to make my purchase on the street, which had the added benefit of aggravating what had been a smug seller until he realized I wasn’t bluffing.

The secondary lesson here is not to schedule two things in one day, as the workman I had hired showed up at my door just as my computer pinged to tell me I had 15 seconds to make my purchase. Okay, actually 20 minutes, but I was already in a frenzy, so it seemed like 15 seconds. I believe that’s a corollary to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.