Our Free $200 Mistake

Joey and I went to the Dallas Symphony on Friday night to hear Tchaikovsky's Second Piano Concerto.  We're going on Saturday to hear his First, which I'm quite pleased about!
Joey's able to get free tickets for us from DTS, so we thought we'd take advantage of it as much as possible.  (Especially considering we'd never be able to afford to go on a regular basis--the cheap seats are $25 each!)

We were late on Friday. 

In order to make what is normally a very expensive evening out entirely free, we park on the other side of the freeway (about 5 blocks away) at a place where I can park for free, then walk over to the Meyerson.  (That saves us $10 parking.)  On Friday, we didn't leave in time and didn't get to the parking garage until 7:50; the concert began at 8:00.

And I was wearing stilettos.

We ran/limped as fast as we could to the Meyerson (I got blisters), Joey got our tickets while I waited upstairs, and we rushed in to see if we could be seated...ten minutes late.

The usher looked at our ticket and said, "Section A, seats 8 and 9, are to your left, all the way down."

(We were quite giddy; the left side is ideal during a piano concerto because it's perfect to see the pianist's hands.)

We scurried down the hall and Joey said, "Section A, seats 8 and 9!  Here we are."  No ushers were standing in the hall to direct us, so we opened the door and found ourselves in a tiny, soundproof antechamber. 

Odd. 

We opened the second door and found ourselves in the absolute best seats in the house; we were one level up, directly over the pianist's right shoulder.  We sat down in our chairs (not theater seats, but individual, velvet lined armchairs) and looked at each other with big eyes.

The other couples in the box looked at us funny, but we decided we didn't care. 

At intermission the box cleared out and Joey and I sat looking at the theater map, trying to figure out exactly where we were sitting.

"I think we're in this section here," Joey pointed to a section on the map.

"No, I think we're here," I said, pointing to the loge box section.  "But that can't be right because these are free tickets."

He pulled out the tickets and noted that they said Choral Terrace, Section A, seats 8 and 9.

"Um....I think we're in the wrong spot."  Joey said.  He'd gone a little pale.

I looked at the tickets.  "OH NO."  I said. 

The Choral Terrace is where the chorus stands when they sing with the symphony.  They're the cheap, cheap seats that are up above the symphony.

"We'd better go look and see if that matches out tickets," Joey said. 

We picked up our things and slid out of the box, careful not to be seen by the other (snobs) in the section.

Sure enough, we were in the wrong spot.  That was quite obvious when we got to the Choral Terrace.

"Let's go back to our original seats.  Nobody kicked us out of them and they're way better than these."  Joey whispered.

And so we went back to our $100 per ticket seats and enjoyed the rest of the concert.