Tweets for Seats

In lieu of a blog this week, I share with you this great article by Kris Vire about our very own Joe Wescott – we’re so proud of him and his tweets.

“A DOLL’S HOUSE to the left of me, HEARTBREAK HOUSE to the right. Here I am stuck in the MIDDLETOWN with you.”

“Not to give too much away, but we have tickets for SCHMILLION SCHMOLLAR SCHMAURTET this weekend. You should schmet schmum.”

“Somebody call Phil Ponce cuz we’ve got CHICAGO tonight! And the next night and the night after that too!”

Tweets like these greet the Twitter followers of Hot Tix, the half-price ticket service run by the League of Chicago Theatres. Besides creatively letting its tweeps know what shows are available on its list in 140 characters or less, @HotTix links to theater news and reviews and engages followers with trivia questions and hashtag games.

Most of Hot Tix’s thousands of tweets have come from Joe Wescott. A Hot Tix employee for four years, he was recently promoted to associate manager of the service, which sells tickets both online and at a pair of brick-and-mortar outlets, one in the Loop and the other on the Magnificent Mile.

"I did it every once in a while, and then it was like, ‘Joe’s good at this, we need him to do it,’ ” Wescott says of the Twitter account. “I would get phone calls if I was at the other location saying, ‘Will you tweet this?’ ”

Over coffee one recent morning down the street from the Randolph Street Hot Tix outlet, Wescott, 25, says he thinks of his role on Twitter as an extension of what he and his coworkers do at the physical locations. “Theater advocates is what we’re called. Because we don’t always sell tickets; we don’t get every show,” he says.

Read the entire Time Out Chicago article.