The Ticket Taker

A story about fans of David Sedaris having an unusual encounter with him before a reading at UCLA

Jul 22, 2026

Photo by Anne Fishbein

In January 2017, I had to go to Anaheim for the NAMM show, the big musical instrument and equipment expo that takes over the convention center and even a few hotels nearby. It’s a huge show almost beyond imagination. But it dovetailed with a six-day residency that my friend David Sedaris was doing at UCLA, workshopping material for his upcoming book of diary items – Theft By Finding. He was trying to sort out what items worked, both out loud and on paper. He had spent several months going through the diaries and was left with many thousands of words, way more than could fit into the book.

His boyfriend Hugh found a place to rent in Venice through Airbnb and spent the week there with David, catching up with friends, including the photographer Anne Fishbein (her photo of David above). David asked me to join him on the opening night, a chilly and rainy Sunday. The hall was a small black box theater with a capacity of around 100, much smaller than the usual venue he appears at on tour. Those tend to be theaters of around 2,000 seats.

David asked me to come and hang out with him at the show and then drive him back to Venice for dinner with Hugh and Anne. Because the show was in this small venue, there wasn’t room for a pre-show or post-show signing, so David came up with his own version of a meet-and-greet. Before the show, I “worked” the door with him as he acted anonymously (or at least unannounced) as one of the two ticket takers. He used a bar-code-zapping scanner, wielding it like a six-shooter to scan the online print-out tickets, even pretend-blowing smoke from the ersatz barrel and putting it back into an imaginary holster. I would say that 20% of the people coming in didn’t recognize him at all. Another 20% realized it only after they had gone past, doing a real double-take—looking twice at the picture of him on the printout of their ticket and then back at him— but then couldn’t go back because of the flow of foot traffic. The other 60% were very excited and tried to converse with him, but couldn’t do much of that because, well, he had a job to do and a crowd of people had to come into the theater through that same narrow entrance.

There were two lines with a regular ticket taker on the other side and when one older woman came up alone with her ticket for David to scan in, he asked her warmly, “Did you come with anyone?” She answered, nervously and somewhat surprised, “Yes, she’s over there, thanks.” The lady who had come with her but went in through the other ticket taker said angrily to her friend, after they had passed us and just as they were walking into the theater, “Why would that usher ask a question like that? What’s it to him whether you’re with someone or not?” He heard her and just loved that reaction and later that night, when we were at dinner at the house they were renting, he retold what happened to Hugh and Anne, cackling with laughter.

You gotta love a writer who really listens to his audience, right? Even the ones who don’t like him. Most of his audience love him and are positively obsessed with him. As I was standing there with David in the entrance, one woman came up and whispered to me, “Can you get him to pose for a photo with me?” No. Another asked me, again in a whisper, “Are you Hugh?” No.

All that love notwithstanding, the reading went differently from any other that I’d seen by David. Introducing the show, he said, “I am calling this a workshop, so I don’t have any obligation to entertain you.” People laughed at that line, maybe harder than they did for a lot of the show. I think they were expecting him to be riotously funny and tell his vintage stories filled with poignancy and wit. But he was working through the draft for the first book of diary items trying to figure out which ones would be interesting or entertaining to people. Almost like reading through a notebook of potential jokes. When they didn’t land, he started rushing a bit. Later he told me that the rest of the week went better as he slowed down and gave some space between the items. And he realized which stories worked well live. In the end, even if the folks attending that first night’s show didn’t enjoy the reading, they’ll always have a story to tell about David taking their tickets for his show.