Michael Jackson public memorial set for Tuesday
Organizers have finalized event and ticket arrangements for Michael Jackson's memorial service, ensuring a chaotic Tuesday (7/7) for anyone traveling or working near downtown Los Angeles.
The Staples Center will host the event at 10 a.m. on Tuesday. The venue will be filled to a public capacity of 11,000, with an overflow crowd of 6,500 watching a live feed at the Nokia Theatre across the street.
AEG Live, who had been working closely with Jackson on his planned comeback shows at the company's O2 arena in London, owns the Staples and Nokia venues and made tickets available over the weekend on a lottery basis.
Fans submitted a reported 1.6 million requests for tickets from 10 a.m. Friday (7/4) to 6 p.m. Saturday (7/5). From those requests, 8,750 winners were selected to receive a pair of tickets and wristbands, which will be needed not only for admission to the venue, but for passage through traffic checkpoints that will be set up in a reported 12-block radius around the LA Live complex that houses the memorial venues.
The ticket and wristband system was put in place in part to minimize scalping, though entrepreneurial types spent much of Monday trying to list tickets and the vouchers used to pickup tickets on both eBay and Craigslist.
Both companies announced they would be pulling Jackson memorial ticket listings and, with the help of angry fans who vowed to report any listing that goes up, spent much of Monday playing cat-and-mouse with would-be sellers on the services as they repeatedly tried to re-list their offerings.
On Monday (7/6), memorial organizers issued a partial list of guests invited to the memorial service, including Kobe Bryant, Mariah Carey, Jennifer Hudson, Magic Johnson; Martin Luther King III, John Mayer, Lionel Richie, Smokey Robinson, the Rev. Al Sharpton, Brooke Shields, Usher and Stevie Wonder.
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