Code Attorney

I was recently at the Ravinia Festival, an outdoor park for music with my daughter.  She bought me tickets to see a band and we were having a good time but then the singer urged the security guards at the entrances to the pavilion (where we were sitting) to let in people sitting on the lawn. The young ticket takers didn’t know what to do and patrons (who had been drinking) began to pour into the pavilion, filling up the aisles and the front of the stage. I turned to my daughter and said that the fire marshall wouldn’t like this.   There was no way we would have been able to leave with this throng of people.  It was also a hot, humid 90’s degree night.  Thankfully there were only a few songs left until the end of the program and the band left the stage.  The crowd cried for an encore but eventually some guy came out and had to be the bad guy, telling people without tickets for the pavilion they had to leave or the show couldn’t continue.  By that time, police officers had arrived to oversee the exodus from the pavilion.  The band eventually came back out but the singer decried the killing of rock and roll by not allowing people to be spontaneous and enjoy themselves.  He later made mention that he knew the fire marshall was just doing his job but I was appalled by the ignorance of the danger involved in that type of setting.  It did show how quickly a venue like that can respond to a threat and I have to give credit to the fire marshall for acting so fast in what could have been a volatile situation.  My daughter’s plan to drag me behind the huge speakers a the edge of the stage if things got ugly never had to be implemented.