Cool weather, jovial attitudes highlight smooth handout
HAILEY — Nearly 10,000 tickets were given away in just three hours Saturday morning to people hoping to hear the Dalai Lama’s message of compassion and healing on Sept. 11.
At Hailey’s Wood River High School, the main distribution point, a couple thousand people of all ages and types snaked through a parking lot, in front of the school and out to the street.
People were there to get tickets for the Dalai Lama’s “healing address,” which is expected to be the highlight of his multiple-day visit to the Wood River Valley this fall. The Dalai Lama will talk at the high school stadium on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He also is scheduled to visit with schoolchildren and business leaders.
Early Saturday, a young man with a red mohawk and piercings stood next to an older woman in a cowboy hat. Children napped in strollers, dogs sniffed each other and people chatted with newfound friends to pass the time. Many wore jackets or wrapped themselves in blankets to ward off a chilly pre-dawn breeze.
Shortly after the sun popped above the steep hills east of Hailey, the line began to move. Anybody who wasn’t in line by 8 a.m. was too late. It was all over by 11 a.m.
The scene was similar in Ketchum, where about 3,000 tickets were gone by 9 a.m. Organizers had planned to continue the ticket giveaway today but cancelled those plans after all available tickets were snapped up Saturday. Cal Millar of Ketchum was one of the lucky ones. Millar and 6-year-old daughter Dylan, who slept in her little red wagon, were among the first in the Ketchum line at 5 a.m. for a second chance to hear the Nobel Prize-winning spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists.
She first heard him two years ago in New York and was impressed by his reverence, wisdom and humor.
“When you hear him, it definitely instills these qualities of hope and kindness and inspiration,” Millar said. “I’m going just to hear him say the profound yet simple, simple things we all should know and we all forget.”
Later, when the supply of tickets finally dwindled to a precious few, people who had been waiting in the Hailey line for hours cheered as they passed the final gate.
“Whoo-hoo,” they yelled as if they had scored a touchdown.
“Yee-haw,” cried one.
“Huzzah, huzzah,” cheered another.
Volunteers lined both sides of the final approach and applauded.
“It feels like the end of a marathon race,” said a happy ticket holder.
Renee Phillips of Ketchum and her daughter Kali, 14, got the last six tickets. They felt bad for their new friends in line who were left empty-handed, but they are eager to hear a message of hope and compassion.
“This is like it was meant to be,” Renee Phillips said, “and there will be something said that we are all meant to listen to.”
Most people took the maximum four tickets, which made the giveaway go quickly, said Rod Rinker, assistant to Kiril Sokoloff, the Ketchum resident who invited the Dalai Lama to the Wood River Valley. It looked like a couple thousand people were standing in lines early Saturday morning in Ketchum and Hailey waiting for tickets, though organizers didn’t have an exact count.
Rinker checked the Hailey line at 5 a.m. and said that at least half the people he talked to were from the Treasure Valley, although he also met people from Salt Lake City and Jackson, Wyo. The rest were from the Wood River Valley.
“It went unbelievably smoothly,” thanks in part to a small army of volunteers assisting with the ticket distribution, he said. The mood in the line stayed jovial, even for the hundred or so that had to be turned away in Ketchum.
“They filed over to donate money to help underwrite the event by buying a T-shirt,” Rinker said.
Lots of people left the Hailey line early when they realized they wouldn’t get tickets, but about 75 hopefuls stuck it out to the end, including friends Joyce Taylor and Christelle Leonard, both of Boise.
They didn’t get tickets to the Sept. 11 event but put their names on a waiting list for tickets to a talk the Dalai Lama will give to schoolchildren the following day.
“I’m not giving up on it yet,” Taylor said.
It’s simply an occasion she doesn’t want to miss.
“I’ve sat with Buddhist monks before,” she said. “You come away from it changed by their energy.”
