At 10am on Thursday, Olivia Rodrigo announced in an Instagram post that she would play a concert in Brooklyn later that night. Tickets went on sale at precisely the same moment – for the princely sum of $25 a pop – not through a Ticketmaster presale code or a virtual waiting room or one of the other digital gauntlets numbingly familiar to today’s concertgoer but in-person only from the box office at Warsaw, the century-old Polish community hall turned music venue in Greenpoint.
That made admission less a transaction than a delicate equation of geography, endurance and luck. Fans who lived in the neighborhood or happened to be nearby made a beeline to Driggs Avenue where the growing queue – including many “remote workers” cradling slightly ajar MacBooks – curled around the block as the heat index reached toward 100F. People arriving around 11.20am were already being turned away. By 11.40am, the roughly 1,000 wristbands had all been snapped up. Hours later, those fortunate few punters found themselves improbably close to one of the biggest pop stars on the planet. Maybe 90% of life really is showing up.
