Letters From The Loft

The situation wasn’t hopeless, though. I could see that there was a clear aisle (represented by the star in my precisely-to-scale diagram) just beyond the Warners booth that seemed a viable avenue of escape if we could just manage to snake through the crowd. So we scrunched our shoulders, put our heads down, and started to mutter the leaving-in-the-middle-of-the-movie mantra: “excuse me; pardon me; sorry; excuse me.” It took a few minutes, but we finally made it to the open area in question. A battlefield is a fluid environment, though, and now the landscape had evolved into this:

It seem that principle members of the cast of Chuck were now on stage at the corner of the Warners exhibit, playing Rock Band to the delirious delight of another batch of frozen-in-their-tracks fans. Still, there was a wide open space between the two crowds, and it looked like we could do an end-run (as indicated by the arrow) around the Chuck crowd and back into an unclogged artery.

I took the first step in that direction and was immediately intercepted by a convention staffer who must have been air-dropped in.

“I’m sorry, you can’t come this way. This aisle is one-way in the other direction,” she said politely.

I looked around me. I couldn’t see anyone breaking free of the Chuck crowd to join the wall of Lost folks behind me. It was a clear shot for us to sneak past the Chuck audience, if I could just summon the guts to run roughshod over this one obstacle… a lady only half my size.

But I couldn’t do it. I tried using reason, but I knew before I started that it was the equivalent of insisting on finishing the marathon after everyone else has had their Gator-Ade and gone home. “We’re just trying to get out of this crowd so we can get over to Artists Alley,” I explained. “Can’t we just slip on by?”

“Sorry, no, we’re trying to keep everyone moving in one direction down this aisle.” I looked behind me to see if something that could be mistaken for movement had occurred while I wasn’t looking, but it was the same massive demonstration of Lost solidarity as before. I tried to summon up some sarcasm.

“Well then,” I asked, “is it okay if all of us”--- I made a sweeping gesture to the open empty aisle she was protecting--- “keep moving through that aisle?” And I pointed to the mass of unmoving folks who were now organizing human ladders to gain a better peek at the Lost cast.

“Absolutely,” she said with a smile. “Thank you.”

I knew when I was whipped, and as I turned around to see what we could do to tunnel out of this mess, I could hear Sam sigh in relief that I hadn’t made a scene. As if that were possible with this crowd.