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By Jimmy Greenfield -- Chicago RedEye -- May 9, 2006 Before the laughs come the lines. Long lines. Hundreds of "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" fans gathered on opposite street corners Tuesday morning several hours before the show began its four-day run at the Chicago Theatre. The general admission line, which began forming at the northeast corner of Lake and State Street around 9 a.m., was for people who had received e-mail ticket reservations. Over at the southwest corner, a standby line grew to about 200 people by 10:30 a.m. If there are seats available after e-mail reservations and VIP's are exhausted, they'll go to the standby line to fill out the Chicago Theatre. The theater was to be opened at 3:30 p.m. Beatriz Jara, 20, and William Houston, 24, tried desperately for e-mail reservations but came up short. So they decided their best was to get in the standby line Monday night. They've been staked out there since 8:30 p.m. "We read books, brought movies," Houston said. "We had somebody try and sell us poetry." "We're the true fans and they just happened to get lucky," he said of the people in the general admission line. Across the street, Mo Gannon, 33, and Joe Gannon, 30, of Virgil, Ill., might dispute that they aren't true fans. They took the 4:48 a.m. train in from Elburn to get in line, and arrived around 7 a.m. "If we're going to take the day off to get in there we better make sure we get in," Mo Gannon said. |