A routine call from work and an ill-timed flight have foiled one Canadian's once-in-a-lifetime chance to say a memorable farewell to Michael Jackson.
Sebastian St-Laurent, an Air Canada flight attendant based in Toronto, is a lifelong fan of the late pop star - the first cassette tape he ever owned was a Jackson album at age 6. So he submitted his name, along with 1.6 million others, in a lottery for tickets to today's memorial service for Mr. Jackson at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.
The 8,750 winners received an e-mailed voucher redeemable for two tickets, and despite elaborate efforts by organizers to prevent ticket scalping, some attempted to capitalize on their good fortune. Asking prices on Craigslist and eBay went as high as $100,000 (U.S.) yesterday before the websites banned sales of the vouchers.
Organizers had opened the draw to non-U.S. residents such as Mr. St-Laurent, who figured he could use his travel privileges with Air Canada and stay with friends should he be one of the lucky ones. But having had no reply by Sunday evening, he agreed to take an overtime shift flying to San Francisco and back.
He woke up yesterday in San Francisco, a mere 560 kilometres from the site of the memorial, to find an e-mail confirming his tickets, but was duty-bound to a flight to Toronto due to land at 6 o'clock this morning - too late to return to California.
"I almost wanted to cry when I got the e-mail," said Mr. St-Laurent, a native of Port-Cartier, Que.
Devastated, he pressed Air Canada to let him work an earlier flight, to no avail. He refused to sell the voucher, instead offering to give it away on Twitter.
"I'm bombarded with messages. I think in the past hour, I got over a hundred," he said.
He gave his voucher to a friend in Los Angeles so she could take her daughter, but the Staples Center's anti-scalping protocol appeared set to dash their hopes as well, as those claiming tickets were required to present ID confirming them as the recipient of the e-mail voucher.
To ensure the tickets themselves were not resold, staff fitted those claiming them with a locking wristband, which must be shown, intact, to gain entry to today's service. However, a Staples Center spokesman acknowledged that winners were free to do with their second ticket as they pleased.
Winners began lining up outside Dodger Stadium at 6 a.m. to collect their purple tickets and gold wristbands. Police turned away anybody without proof of having won the lottery. At the nearby Staples Center, scalpers did a quiet but brisk business despite all the efforts to thwart them.
Greg Harris, the middle-aged manager of an Internet-marketing business, was hawking a pair of tickets won by his 21-year-old niece. She would love to have attended, he said, but needed cash to pay for surgery.
"We think of the money we'll make as Michael's gift to her," Mr. Harris said as he surreptitiously worked the crowd seeking bids. By midmorning he had a solid offer of $700, but he was holding out for $1,000.
Deidre Pannu, 25, and her husband Angat, 24, of Ontario, Calif., were more appreciative, winning a pair of tickets that they won't part with. Deidre, a stay-at-home mother of two, has visited Neverland Ranch and grew up in Santa Maria, Calif., the site of Mr. Jackson's child-sex-abuse trial, where she joined crowds outside the courthouse to catch a glimpse of the star.
"[Angat]was trying to talk me into actually selling the other ticket, but no, I definitely wanted to go," she said.
Immediately after the vouchers for free tickets were e-mailed out, offers to resell them appeared on the Internet, with asking prices ranging from $1,000 to $100,000 (U.S.), a phenomenon that Ken Sunshine, a publicist retained by the Jackson family, called "beneath contempt."
One eBay listing from a California user calling himself Raul Crystal asked for a starting price of $100,000.
His listing, along with others touting ticket vouchers, quickly disappeared, as did similar offers on the classified-ad website Craigslist.
A statement from eBay said "eBay will not allow Michael Jackson memorial service tickets to be listed on the site. When found, eBay will remove them immediately. We believe it is inappropriate to allow the sale of tickets for the Michael Jackson memorial service."
In addition to the 17,500 tickets offered to the public, 9,000 seats were reserved for guests of the Jackson family.
Participants from the music world will include Motown founder Berry Gordy and stars Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson and Lionel Richie; younger performers such as Mariah Carey, Usher and Jennifer Hudson; and 12-year-old Shaheen Jafargholi, who performed a Michael Jackson song this spring on the reality show Britain's Got Talent.
Other notables are from the world of basketball - Magic Johnson and Kobe Bryant - and activists Rev. Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III.
Mr. Jackson's ex-wife, Debbie Rowe, was also on the guest list but backed out yesterday, saying the media attention would be "an unnecessary distraction" from the memorial.
With a report from Tu Thanh Ha
James Bradshaw