by Zach Raffio. @zachraffio.
NEW YORK, NY - The Broadway League announced this week that the theater-wide shutdown will continue on until Leslie Tirmock, the woman who is in charge of locking and unlocking all Broadway theaters each day, finds the keys she misplaced earlier this year, annoyed sources confirmed.
“I swore I put them down on the nightstand like I do every night,” claimed Tirmock while frantically digging through her pocketbook. “To be honest, this is really on the union’s head. There shouldn’t be one person with one set of keys in charge of unlocking every single theater. I should have at least two sets.”
Representatives of the New York theatre community have long been lobbying for a different chain of command when it came to locking theaters. However, efforts to restrict house budgets found that hiring one person to handle the locks for all theaters saved more money, and that copying keys would only dig a deeper hole.
“It’s like 75 cents to get a key made, and if you want a nice brass one, that’s easily over a dollar,” noted Broadway League rep Don Crish while also frantically searching his pocketbook for some reason. “A lot of people think this shutdown has to do with the pandemic, but actually, it’s the fact that Rick’s Keys on 43rd & 9th has such steep prices.”
The shutdown has left tens of thousands of individuals employed by Broadway without a way to earn a living. Many have asked for government assistance during this hardship.
“They need to write up a plan, rush it to the congress floor, and finally get some relief in here,” noted Broadway actress Elisabeth Charleese Betrini. “I mean, even if the government sent only two or three people to help look, that could really increase our chances of finding her keys.”
At press time, Tirmock was in a state of pure panic after pulling a large wooden coffee shop bathroom key out of her jacket pocket, realizing that she must have swapped the two during a recent weekend visit to the Adirondacks. She was last seen on a bus to back to the mountain town, which will get moving as soon as the driver finds his keys.
Sources report that, at the moment, he is frantically searching his pocketbook.