Last night, Matt and I went to show #2 on our Kimmel jazz subscription. Inside the front page of the program was a montage of pictures and blurbs highlighting the Kimmel’s holiday programming. He spotted a blurb for a December 10th concert of Christmas singing by Jane Monheit. “Since when?” Matt exclaimed, as he showed the page to me.

“Since when?” I exclaimed on reading it myself.

This event was not listed in the Kimmel season brochure we got over the summer–trust me, we got multiple copies of that silly document, and it wasn’t in any of them. Nor has it been visble as a featured link from the main webpage–trust me on this one , too: I’ve been there a lot recently trying to figure out if Lion King will be a possibility for my life.

Nice way to hide an event, sparky.

Ever a woman of action, and knowing that we had at least 30 minutes before our November jazz show would begin, I jumped out of our seat and got into the box office line. There were five open windows—four of them for will call and same night tickets, and one for any other sorts of sales or exchanges or issues. And that one lone window was being manned by the slowest ticket-seller I have ever seen in my life. I don’t know if the problem was with her or her computer or the general complexity of queries by the very few people (4? maybe 5?) in line ahead of me. All I know is it took me more than 45 minutes to get served at the front of the line.

(Yes, I missed the first number of last night’s concert, but by the time I relaized that was inevitable, I’d invested so much time and energy in the new transaction that I wasn’t going to step out. Besides, all I could have done is come back at intermission for another god-knows-how-long of waiting.)

Now, I can understand giving some priority to folks needing tix for that night’s show. However, the people in the future sales line may be (like myself) stopping at the box office on their way to tonight’s seats. Even if they’re stopping by the Kimmel on their way to Saturday night plans somewhere else, my line-mates didn’t deserve the endless frustrating wait anymore than I did. Here’s a tip: when one line is beginning to grow moss, call the folks to an extra window now and again.

Seriously. Between the pathetic publicity and the piss-poor customer service, I think El Kimmel is getting a little too complacent about its role as the best game in town for certain types of music.