If you were thinking of heading to a Broadway show in New York, you should probably give them a little more time to cool down. Like, maybe a few thousand years or something.

At the New York Post, conservative writer Douglas Murray relays his experience heading out with friends, including Jordan Peterson, to see a production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child at Broadway's Lyric Theater:

On the way into the theater, bouncer-like staff screamed at us to form the correct queues and have the right documentation ready. We appeared to be visiting Azkaban, not Hogwarts. It was just the first of the evening's delights.

It is true that, in the age of COVID, a great many managers and professionals treat each and every human interaction as if it were a potential mass casualty event waiting to happen:

But it gets better:

Soon a member of staff came to warn me that I had failed to pull my mask up fast enough after my most recent swig of beer. As the show began, someone with a name badge saying "Libby" came over and told off another member of our group for failing to bring their mask up swiftly enough after sipping another of the overpriced drinks the Lyric Theatre had just sold us.

That's truly incredible. What's more incredible is to imagine the intensive, uncompromising coaching that these people have to go through to be able to identify second-by-second mask non-compliance in a crowded theater setting. I bet it looks like an old-school samurai training sequence.

Murray and his buddies, meanwhile, were such flagrant mask-rule-breakers that they drew the sustained ire of the theater's enforcement officer:

After the lights had gone low, I noticed Libby standing at the end of our row staring down it, hands on hips. There she stayed, glaring through the dark.

That's good service for you!

Eventually Murray and Peterson decided to speak to the manager, with hilarious results:

We asked. At which point we were reintroduced to Libby. Libby was the manager, and explained that we were under suspicion because our group had already received three warnings for insufficiently speedy remasking after sips.

Man, we've all been there... and you know how it feels when that happens:

So if you're thinking about going to a Broadway performance, I'd suggest just staying home and reading the script instead. Maybe act it out with your friends or something. Do anything but go to an actual theater right now.

After all... Libby's still out there somewhere... and she's the manager!

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