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photo by Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images
On Monday night, George Michael hit Madison Square Garden for the first of two shows. The good seats were priced at $255 each, a sum that seems pretty excessive for an artist who doesn't put on a gigantic production a la Madonna and hasn't delivered a big hit album in the U.S. in more than 15 years.
The crowd ranged in age from 30 to 50, and as Michael joked, included a lot of "boys" (i.e., gay men) and straight women who dragged their boyfriends. Michael actually apologized to them.
The fashion world was well represented. Hairdresser Sally Hershberger was sitting in the third row; Sam Shahid, the former art director of Interview, and Bruce Weber's longtime collaborator, was perched at the front of a long catwalk Michael used as his stage, and the Cinema Society's Andrew Saffir and his partner, Daniel Benedict, were nearby in the loge, as was Bruce Pask, the men's fashion director for T, The New York Times Style Magazine.
And though the ticket prices may keep some from pursuing a pair of tickets to Michael's second Garden show on Wednesday, there seem to be a lot of good deals on craigslist from brokers who failed to get rid of their tickets and are now selling at considerably below face value. This reporter, for the record, got his sixth-row seat from a scalper 10 minutes before the show started. The price was $120, less than half of the face value printed on the ticket. And it was well worth it.
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