"Time doesn't exist," proclaimed a man ahead of me in line. "It's just a social construct."
The companions to whom he spoke, a small congregation of hip-looking 20-somethings, nodded vigorously. Several met his declaration with vocal affirmations of its veracity.
On my other side, a man with a scruffy beard inquired about my origins. An aspiring symphony cellist, he enlightened me on the particulars of the great stringed instrument: what draws one to the cello, how players care for theirs, the emotions evoked by the plucking of its chords.
A vendor armed with menus for a nearby Mexican deli made his way down the line that stretched out of sight both ahead of and behind me. He called out various dishes to its increasingly hungry constituents. Clients could order sustenance on the spot and have it delivered without abandoning their posts. What brilliant opportunism, I thought.
The wait that bound us all in this snaking artery through the heart of Central Park was for no less worthy prize than free tickets to a production of The Tempest. Shakespeare in the Park is a wonderful tradition that makes world-class theater accessible to all who are willing to wait for it. The most dedicated are found camped out at the front, ensconced in blanket forts with ample reading materials and enough provisions to last seven barren years. Or at least seven hours.
The enthusiastic but slightly less zealous are found behind the indomitably patient avant-garde, biting their nails as the hours tick by, the uncertainty of whether their spots are forward enough to grant them a golden ticket looming overhead.
I had once before waited on this line with my sister in a previous season. We arrived at what we considered an ungodly hour of the morning and assumed our stations in a position that quickly lost its rearmost status as many more tacked on behind us, only to be told hours later that we had not made the cut. We returned home without tickets in our hands but with plenty of good conversation in our heads.
This time around, the friend with whom I waited and I arrived at an even more blasphemous hour for college students on summer break to be awake on a Sunday morning, and we were duly rewarded. Not only with tickets to a spectacular show, but with the sights and sounds of hundreds of fanatical theater-attending hopefuls that constituted a truly spectacular pre-show, as well.
The Tempest is a striking piece, brimming with drama and humor and intrigue. As satisfying as seeing it is the discovery of all these elements in the arguably equally poetic context of five hours on a bench in the park.