So I worked as an usher/front of house person in high school and university. Good hours for a student (evenings and weekends), decent $$, and you can hear and see parts of the show for free. But we saw some very interesting people coming in to do shows.
The most interesting one for me language-wise was a group of people coming in from one of the Russian minority groups, Tuva. They mostly spoke their native dialect and some Russian, except for one or two of them, who spoke Russian well. They had a Russian interpreter, who spoke Russian and a few other languages. The relevant thing here is that his English wasn’t great, but his French was good.
Now, it turned out that the person with the best French on duty that night was me, the 16-year-old high schooler working the ticket desk. The front of house manager came out in a terrible tizzy, swapped me out with one of the ushers, and then I spent the rest of the evening translating. It was the weirdest chain - the band leader (Tuvan, speaking in Russian) -> translator (Russian, speaking in French) -> me (Canadian, speaking English) -> my manager, then the opposite as the message went back to the band leader and he conferred with his people.
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