August 13, 2014 8:02 pm

Blink and you’ll miss it… StarTalk Live! sold out again

Tickets for StarTalk Live! at The Bell House went on sale at 1:00 PM EDT last Friday, 8/8/14. For the first time ever, we’re doing two shows on two consecutive nights, as part of this year’s Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival. 9/21 is StarTalk Live! with guest host Bill Nye the Science Guy, and on 9/22 it’s StarTalk Live! hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

The 9/22 show sold out in less than 20 minutes. It took a little longer for the 9/21 show to sell out, but by the end of the day, it was gone too.

This seems to be an increasingly frequent occurrence for us – and I’m not writing this post to brag or anything. I’m writing it because those of you who read this blog are some of our most loyal fans, and some of you missed out on getting seats.

And it’s not just New Yorkers who missed out this time – we’ve had people ask us how they can find out about upcoming shows, so they can plan vacations around it.

And it’s not just StarTalk Live! Neil deGrasse Tyson’s speaking tour is selling out across the country, with so much demand that scalpers are selling tickets for over $200 on Stub Hub, according to this article on Motherboard.

The Motherboard article concludes that this is a good thing: “When you can convince thousands of people to listen to you talk about astrophysics, you’re doing something right. And when the people demand more, when they split with a couple hundred bucks just to watch you do it, well, that just bodes well for everyone.”

And yes, that is a good thing. Unless you didn’t get a seat for the upcoming shows at The Bell House.

The Bell House is home turf for StarTalk. We had our first ever StarTalk Live! there, back on Sept. 15^th, 2011 as part of the 4^th Annual Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival. (They’ve stopped numbering them and just use the year now. And they’ve expanded to Boston, too. You can find out more about the Eugene Mirman Comedy festival here.)

I attended my first StarTalk Live! at The Bell House: it was The Particle Party on Wednesday, July 11^th, 2012, celebrating the discovery of the Higgs boson with Neil, Eugene, Bill Nye the Science Guy (now a frequent STL! guest host), CERN Physicist and NYU Assistant Professor of Physics Kyle Cranmer, Sarah Vowell, and Scott Adsit, now an STL! Veteran with 3 shows under his belt.

Our Bell House shows are special. They’re cozy and intimate, especially compared to Town Hall or The Brooklyn Academy of Music or The Beacon Theatre.  But even those larger venues in which we’ve played recently have sold out or nearly sold out as well.

Anyway, I guess the point of this post is that times are changing, and, like trying to get seats to a movie premier in NYC on a Friday night a few minutes before the show, you can’t wait until the last minute to get your seats to StarTalk Live! anymore.

We’ll try to give you as much notice as possible. Sometimes, especially with the larger venues, we are able to offer exclusive fan presale windows. My commitment to you is that we will always give you as much advance notice as we are able to.

The rest is up to you.

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!

–Jeffrey Simons