House of Ushers
Inside the world of the people who take you to your seat
One evening decades ago, in a bathroom inside one of our country’s finest concert halls, I gazed into the mirror and examined my new uniform. I was wearing a white turtleneck shirt, navy blazer, and gray slacks. I looked like a TV game show host. But I had little time to contemplate my appearance. In a few minutes, I would debut as a concert usher. Other ushers were pulling on uniforms in the stalls and running up the backstage stairs for the 6:15 pre-concert meeting.
I gave a tug at my itchy outfit — the result of high polyester content — and followed my co-workers to the Usher’s Room. Several of us were new for the season. We looked at the veterans with respect. They could locate a seat with just a glance at a ticket. They knew the locations of all the restrooms and had memorized the regulations regarding cameras, audio recordings, and gum chewing. Everybody wore the same turtleneck, navy jacket, and grey slacks.
A bright-eyed, boyish looking man with tussled hair entered the room. He was Burt, the head usher. His deputy, the lanky and wisecracking Tim, accompanied him. I had already met them at an orientation session a few days before. At that time, Burt and Tim had led the new ushers on a tour of the concert hall, whose highlights included the instrument storage areas backstage, the radio broadcast booth, and the image of Mickey Mouse that the acoustical cubes formed, when squinted at properly, at the rear of the stage.
For the pre-concert meeting, Burt was curt and efficient. After reading out a list of our stations in the hall, he warned us that for this first concert of the season, with the big-name music director conducting, it was especially important for us not to allow late-arriving patrons to enter during the quiet opening moments.
As a newbie, I was stationed in a lightly trafficked area on the third balcony. My trainer was Signe, an experienced usher and a university student in Norwegian. Unlike many of us, she actually looked authoritative in a white turtleneck. In five years of ushering, I was never able to duplicate the ease with which she calmed latecomers and reseated patrons who had taken the wrong seats.
But as I gained experience as an usher, I became skilled. The key to ushering, I learned, is developing the ability to answer the same questions, over and over and night after night, while maintaining diplomacy and a sense of humor. Even drunks, and there are quite a few of them at classical concerts, want to be treated with respect.
Ushers who mastered the basics reaped a rich reward: the music. I treasure my memories of performances by such artists as Andres Segovia, Kathleen Battle, and Vladimir Horowitz. (A rumor circulated in the Ushers Room that Horowitz contractually required a fried chicken dinner in his hotel room before his performances, but I don’t know if it was true.) Repeated viewings of George Winston, B.B. King, Rosemary Clooney, and Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians (the long deceased Mr. Lombardo was absent) — not to mention countless boys choirs, string quartets, Chinese circuses, brass quintets, and bands impersonating the Beatles — broadened my musical taste.
I also looked forward to seeing many regular patrons of the concert hall, including the man who arrived at orchestra concerts with armloads of scores to follow during performances, the dressed up elderly couples and the dressed down college students, aspiring musicians who idolized the folks on stage, and the guy who sat through summer concerts with his small radio and earphone to catch the play-by-play of baseball games.
Most of all, though, I liked my coworkers. I kept up friendships with fellow ushers long after I retired from tearing tickets in half. I’m sure today’s ushers are just as endearing as we were. You should get to know them. I only hope their uniforms are more comfortable now.
