“Oh? Try me, Horace.”

“Well, you know that ticket factory down on Elm Street?”

“You mean the place where they make the tickets for all the big shows, like Pearl Jam and Third Eye Blind?”

“That’s the one. It caught fire today.”

“Fire? At the ticket factory? Oh, no!”

“It was incredible, Zelda. Every fire department within 200 miles was there. People were running into the building to try to salvage the engraving plates used to print the Electric Barnyard Tour tickets, while students from all the local elementary schools volunteered to form a human ladder in efforts to save tickets for Pete Yorn, Vince Gill and Neil Young. It was amazing.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. This city always pulls together in the face of catastrophe. But what about those new Cher tickets they were supposed to release this week? You know, the ones with the revolutionary new design?”

“I’m afraid they’re history, Zelda.”

“And the tickets for Bjork that were guaranteed to become collectors’ items?”

“They lost those too, as well as the tickets for The Human League and The Dead.”

“Oh, no! You mean they lost all those tickets, including the ones for Martina McBride, Blake Shelton and Diamond Rio?”

“Nothing but ashes, Zelda. I guess it’s true what I heard the President say on the radio. Today really is a day that will live in infamy.”

“But… but… Didn’t anything survive?”

“Well, now that you mention it, after the fire had been burning a while, someone started screaming from the top floor.”

“Screaming? You mean, someone was trapped?”

“That’s right, Zelda. A woman and her two kids. Evidently, they were taking one of those tours through the ticket factory when the fire broke out, and they were trapped on the top floor, standing on a crate full of tickets for ZZ Top and Lynyrd Skynyrd.”

“That’s terrible! Then what happened?”

“It was incredible, Zelda. The lady and her two kids were yelling for help through the window, the flames were everywhere, when suddenly… Oh, it’s just too unbelievable for words.”

“What? What happened next?”

“This guy swung down from the building across the street on some kind of silk-like cable. He was dressed from head to toe in a red skin-tight jumpsuit. He even had a red hood on his head covering his face.”

“Really?”

“Uh, uh. He took one look at the burning building, then noticed the woman and her two kids trapped by the flames on the top floor. That’s when the most incredible, most fantastic thing I’ve ever seen happened.”

“What? Tell me! Tell me!”

“He muttered something about his ‘spidey sense tingling,’ and then he crawled up the side of the ticket factory, just like a bug, all the way to the top floor.”

“No way!”

“Way. Then he shot another silk-like cable from his wrist and the four of them slid down the cable to safety.”

“Wow!”

“I told you it was unbelievable, Zelda.”

“Unbelievable isn’t the half of it, Horace. You mean to tell me that a guy in a red suit crawled up the side of the burning building, just like a… a… spider, and rescued a woman and her two kids from the ticketing inferno by shooting silk-like ropes out of his wrist?”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much the size of it. Awfully incredible, uh?”

“I’ll say. I mean, a real hero would have saved the tickets.”

“I know. There’s just no accounting for some people’s priorities.”