If that train ever does come back, then I will be on board.

Last night found me at Studio 54, sitting in the audience of A Streetcar Named Desire. Good stuff. I’m glad to have seen it. I had been granted a complimentary “general admission” ticket, which meant basically I would show up, and then five minutes prior to curtain they would seat me in the best available seat at that time. Never one to care where I’m seated in a theater, that was fine by me.

When I got there, I was pleased to see that they had a simple and efficient seating system in place. All general admission ticket holders were given a numbered seating pass upon our arrival, and then at the appointed time we were to be seated in the order of the numbers on our passes. Simple. Orderly. I like order, especially in situations like these that have the potential to devolve into Lord-of-the-Flies, every-man-for-himself scenarios.

So I stood there in our little group, pre-seating, and chatted with the pleasant enough two dozen or so people around me, all of whom were easily twice my age. Minimum. How sweet. The gist of their conversations centered around how this production would live up to their memories of Brando or Jessica Lange, or any number of other names I recognized but can no longer remember. Having never seen the film or any other production of the play, I had little to contribute to the conversation, but stood there nodding my head and enjoying its pleasant tone of anticipation.

And then all hell broke loose.

Seating time came, and any memory of our preceding (human) pleasantries was abandoned as the panic of getting that “best available” seat ensued. I watched in a combination of shock and amusement as a dozen or so of these, my elders, whom I reminded myself I must respect, pushed passed me (ignoring the significantly higher numbers on their passes) and succeeded in being seated ahead of me. They might as well have elbowed me in the ribs and exclaimed, “See ya, sucka!”

Ah well, I certainly wasn’t going to put up a fight. I settled into my own perfectly comfortable seat, puzzling over the abrupt transformation and alarming behavior of my fellow theater-goers. But whatever. I sighed and prepared myself to embark on the light-hearted joyride that is this little ditty of a play. (Oh you know, alcoholism, domestic violence, rape, insanity. Happy fare.)

Midway through, we're told that the opposite of desire is, in fact, death. And suddenly I had a much better understanding of my fellow general admissioners: they were simply alive! Their behavior was a pure, unbridled demonstration of their vitality; of just how alive they are and hence, just how far away from death. Because damn, did they desire those seats!

On my train ride home, the man I was standing next to saw me thumbing through my playbill and asked, “How was the play?”

I smiled and replied, “Oh it was good. Yeah. I enjoyed it." He told me he had just come from seeing something else, and I smiled and asked, “Oh yeah, how was that?”

He told me it was good. At that moment, we stopped in the Lincoln Center station, and a man got on with a large white instrument case. Probably a bass. A woman two seats away from where I was standing got his attention, smiled, and asked whether he played for the ballet.

“No, I play for Light in the Piazza,” he replied with a smile, clarifying that it was a musical when the woman failed to recognize the name.

What was this??? Strangers chatting on the subway? Without the unifying subject of a terrorist attack or other disaster? I felt like I had crossed into an alternate dimension, where people are united under the common banner of New York City theater. Or something. Damn. Such friendliness. Such pleasantries. I was pleasantly taken aback. Maybe there is hope for humanity after all, I thought.

That is, until we’re forced to compete with each other for best-available, general admission seating!