A school field trip to a Broadway musical is a genuinely lovely idea until it’s not only them filling a theatre and the students decide the assigned seating is more of a suggestion than an actual rule, then it’s more jungle than field, more bad trip than just «a» trip

First row looks good, let’s move there. Those people showed up, fine, let’s try another row. Those people showed up too, but this time we are just going to hold our ground and argue about it. At no point in this sequence did anyone stop and think about why their seats might not be someone else’s seats. The concept just did not register.

The thing about theater seats is that they aren’t first-come, first-served. They aren’t vibes-based. They aren’t a social experiment about who wants it more. Someone paid actual money for a specific seat, and that transaction does not become void because a group of eighth graders decided a different row had better energy. Rolling your eyes at the person whose seat you are currently sitting in is a bold choice. Rolling your eyes at the worker who comes to remove you is a bolder one.