In Which The Antiques Roadshow Comes to Dallas...and I have a Front Row Seat.

The PBS show The Antiques Roadshow came to Dallas on Saturday. KERA is Dallas' National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Station. I've been volunteering at KERA, answering the phones at pledge drives, for almost a year now. A couple of months ago, a call was sent out to their regular volunteers to work the Antiques Roadshow, and I got my response in early. Even though they needed 100 of us, I'm glad my response was quick, because they got all their volunteers quickly, and had a list of others waiting to take our places if we couldn't do it.

We had training on this past Friday afternoon, with the show to be on Saturday. Below is a part of a pic of my volunteer group from Friday's training. (I'm in the back row, to the very left of the pic). No pics were allowed to be taken on the Saturday, and even on Friday we had to get permission from the lighting people, and couldn't use a flash, to take this pic. Russell, the volunteer kneeling at the front of the our group, had the presence of mind to bring the camera and get the pic taken. Our ARS "boss", Justin, took the pic.



You can see the set being assembled behind us...the large panels are attached to make a circle, with the tables of appraisers at the inside perimeter, and the filming done in the center. We had a few spaces between panels to bring in our visitors.

Back to the Friday - we were given blue/gray polo shirts to wear, with the "Antiques Roadshow" emblem on the left breast. You can see, some of the volunteers are already wearing them in the pic. ARS employees wore black ones. The 100 volunteers were divvied up for different jobs - my group was "triage"; there were 20+ of us in that group.

The visitors to ARS start out in a huge room, in long lines, and in groups according to the time indicated on their ticket (11 different times, 7am to 5pm, on the hour). Mid-afternoon, I peeked into that area, and it was a veritable sea of humanity - I think there were about 5-6000 people there over the day, each with 2 items. I'm not sure how people got the tickets, but one couple I was chatting with, as I was walking with them to their first appraisal, said they paid $400 for theirs, and they were as happy as could be to have gotten them - I think they had more than 10,000 requests for tickets. And I think I'm lowballing, it might have been a 2 instead of a 1 in that number, I'm just can't remember all the producer said about it, during our training.

The next step is to enter the main room, where their items are seen by "generalist" appraisers, and they are given tickets for each item. The ticket indicates which category they are to go to. For example, at the end of the day, I had a book appraised (nothing exciting, I've sold my most interesting books!), and here is the ticket for it:



Clutching their treasures and their tickets, they come up to us, at the pink line taped on the floor, where we are standing, waiting to ferry them safely to the correct appraiser....or to the end of another line.

... and end of part 1, off to do life stuff. Everyone have a wonderful day!