Notes From Under the House

We have tickets for this weekend’s L. A. Times Festival of Books. We’ve been attending this “free” event for years and Ticketmaster always distributed free tickets. This year, Ticketmaster decided to slap a seventy –five cent service fee onto the FREE tickets. Seventy-five cents isn’t much, although it won’t buy a cup of coffee, but it’s the principle of it. Ticketmaster has to get their greed into it some way, somehow.  The festival is always an event for us. I mean, we plan our weekends around it. We pack a lunch and strategize who’s going where and where we’ll meet back if there are discussions we want to hear going on at the same time, and what and how many books to bring to get signed, et al. We always have a blast running around.  But this year neither one of us is impressed with the line-up. We have tickets for Gore Vidal and Gay Talese, both of whom we’ve seen before and are worth seeing again, and Ray Bradbury who we had tickets to see a couple of years ago, but he had to cancel due to illness. We’re only attending Saturday, one because there’s no one interesting on Sunday and two, we’re supposed to go to Burbank to see relatives. There aren’t even any panel discussions I want to sit in on. What’s happening? Are my taste changing or is the event not like it used to be? I’m not even interested in picking up a couple of bags of the traditional kettle popcorn.