The Fine Line

It's film festival season here in New York and yesterday, my Arabic tutor and I decided to go buy tickets to a new hot Egyptian film that's showing. We're talking a HOT MOVIE! When we arrived to buy tickets for Friday's showing, there was a line around the block for a showing starting in fifteen minutes. If this was a movie from anywhere else, such a line would be uninteresting and un-noteworthy. But no, this was a Middle East line almost to the core.

The first thing I found amusing was that there were several groups of families. Some of the family members were dutifully standing in the American line waiting their turn while other family members were trying to find some way to get a ticket by circumventing the line. The latter job took the form of walking through the line of people waiting to buy tickets for Friday, trying to convince the female, American bouncer (who thought THAT was a good idea? Not so much because she was female but because she wasn't big enough to look like an authority) that they had been sent in to the emergency ticket sales line. Then when that didn't work, they went to the front of our line and tried to cut in and purchase a ticket. When that didn't work, they waited until someone who spoke Arabic got sent to the emergency ticket line and then began bargaining (in Arabic) to get the emergency line people to buy them a ticket. I was highly amused because here they are thinking they're being all on the down low and I understood every word of it!

I have to say I felt right at home! The poor female bouncer had no idea how to handle a group of people like this and I kind of felt bad for her. There were too many things going on all at once for her to focus on, she didn't understand the conversations going on around her, she had no idea how such things worked, and she was unaware that simply saying anything wasn't going to deter these people. She really did need to be a very large authority person in order to get them to listen or at least needed to speak Arabic. In a city this size, I'm sure they could have gotten someone who fit all of those criteria.

I also have to say that I was pretty proud of myself for knowing how to handle the line-crowding. A man tried to cut in front of us and I had absolutely none of it. I used every tactic I learned while buying lunch in Jordan and got the man to cut just behind us. I don't know which was more satisfying: seeing the man's face when I started speaking in Arabic, or knowing how to work the line.