Section
Pepperdine Links
Online Publications
Somebody fibbed and now they’re going to pay.
That was my initial reaction after Thursday’s debacle of epic proportions. What happened, you ask? I had a chance to see Neil Diamond snatched from my grasp by liars and thieves.
You may have noticed e-mails in your school inbox saying the Student Activities office had “several hundred” Neil Diamond tickets for his concert at Staples Center on Friday night. The e-mail went on to say that tickets would be available to all alumni, faculty and students at 11 a.m. on Thursday.
That e-mail is exhibit A in my case to prove without a shadow of a doubt that Pepperdine lied to us. Let me bring my first witness to the stand. Oh wait, that’s me.
I was excited to see Neil. Even the incriminating e-mail said something to the effect that he was one of the greatest performers in human history. Unfortunately I can’t be the judge of Mr. Diamond’s greatness, for on Friday night, I was home sulking with dulcet tones of “I am, I said” pumping out of my laptop speakers.
Now, many of you are probably thinking I showed up late to get tickets. On the contrary, I was so amped for the distribution, that my roommates and I coordinated a ticket-gathering plan for Thursday morning at 11. There was no way somebody was getting our tickets. But of course, Pepperdine pulled some shenanigans, and I was ticketless despite being at the Student Activities office no later than 11:05.
I thought to myself, “Is it possible to distribute several hundred tickets in less than five minutes?” The obvious answer is no. That’s totally impossible. Something shady was going on, and I was determined to find out what. That’s when my investigative reporting instinct kicked in.
I began asking around about the fate of those tickets. There were stories about the Student Activities staff office thinking there was no way that amount of tickets would be given out in one day. They supposedly let a few employees take stacks of tickets and give them out willy nilly.
Another story said somebody came into the office where the tickets were late at night and strewn them about the room in a festive manner as if Neil Diamond tickets had little or no intrinsic value. The tickets were then allegedly discarded because somebody didn’t know what else to do. If this was true, these people are sinners.
But I couldn’t believe the tall tales being thrown my way, so I set out to get to the bottom of the story by going to the top. That’s right, I made a call to Student Activities and demanded to know exactly what happened to my hopes and dreams of see Neil sing “Sweet Caroline” at 375 decibels.
Apparently, I’m not the only person on this campus who was excited about seeing Neil. Nay, I was part of a silent majority of Diamond fans, according to the Student Activities office, many of whom used their love of Neil as justification for “cheating” in the ticket-collecting process.
According Justin Schneider, student activities adviosr, many of the tickets were lost in a web of poor communication and given out to faculty and students before Thursday. Some were sent to the West L.A. satellite campus to better take advantage of Diamond’s older target audience. Others were promised to alumni and faculty before the announced date. All of this conspired to deny me any chance to see a living legend in concert.
On behalf of my fellow students, I’m asking for an apology. I don’t care where it comes from or even if it’s as sarcastic as this column. I just need to hear “sorry” from somebody involved in this mess.
Whoever it is can find me at a local record store. I’ll be in the adult contemporary section.
Submitted 10-06-2005
MALIBU, CA
