In which I briefly explain an old beef

Joann has always been exceptionally generous in treating me to a show on just about my every visit to NYC. This has included great one-woman shows by Ellen DeGeneres and Bebe Neuwirth; Kate Burton and Michael Emerson in Hedda Gabler; and Julianna Margulies off-Broadway, sitting close enough to bask in the impossible luminosity of her skin. Pretty damn nice.

I truly have no right to complain.

But...

A few years ago, my visit coincided with Dame Helen Mirren and Sir Ian McKellen appearing in their acclaimed run of Strindberg's Dance of Death. As the date of my trip approached, for some reason Joann was seized with an impulse to inform me that she'd wanted to get us tickets for this production, and in fact had had the chance.

But she didn't. Because the only seats available were behind a pole.

This is rather like your friend having the chance to procure seats for the Sermon on the Mount but telling you she didn't think you'd be comfortable sitting on a rock out in the sun all afternoon.

She thought I wouldn't want the chance-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be in the same room, to breathe the same air, as Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen, because I would've had to sit behind a pole.

Not a column, not a wall, not a cruise ship. A piddly little pole.

Please. I've had worse seats in church.

Somehow it never occurred to Joann that I could, you know, lean. And not mind it a damn bit.

Or even that I could be quite content merely to hear the two deities doing their thing a mere matter of meters away, in real time.

I could snipe about jaded New Yorkers here. After all, this is a woman who has breathed the same cigarette smoke as Catherine Deneuve. Who let Isabella Rossellini walk past her on the sidewalk without accosting her to tell her that her friend in Pittsburgh would jump in front of a train for her. But I won't. I wasn't raised there; I can't claim to grasp that part of the culture.

So call me a bumpkin, a hick, a rube. But please consider this: if you're concerned that your companion won't appreciate those Stanley Cup tickets because they're in a corner behind the glass, or that they'll scoff at your offer to treat them to opening night at La Scala because they won't want to sit in the gods, get over it. Believe me, we'll be grateful. Thrilled, in fact. Even with a pole.