After working for more than four decades in the ticketing industry, Bert Picot is enjoying retirement with his husband Brad Arlett and their two cats in the San Francisco Bay area. The couple moved there from New York City in 2016 after Brad received a job offer he could not refuse.
Bert Picot.
“Brad and I are strongly committed to each other,” Bert says lovingly. “He’s intelligent and stubborn when he thinks he's right. But he also challenges me to be better … We have two boy cats, Freddy and Worm, who was nervous at first. After he finally stopped hiding under the desk and other places, he came out and wiggled like a worm. Even today, when we come home and Freddy is sitting down and staring at us, Worm is on the rug, wiggling like a worm.”
Freddy grooming Worm.
Freddy.
Worm.
Because of his love for animals, Bert serves on the board of the Nine Lives Foundation, a pet adoption center and low-cost clinic and spay-neuter service in the Bay area. “I take care of the cats, and then I spend time going through their care and enrichment as a volunteer,” he explains. “For cats in these cages, they need to be interactive. They need to be socialized.”
Bert and his husband also love hiking on trails lined with majestic redwoods and admiring the nearby ocean. At some time in the future, he hopes to go further up the Pacific coast, all the way to Alaska. “I want to see the wildlife and the glaciers before they disappear,” he says.
At home, Bert loves to cook. In addition to his late father’s watch, one of his most treasured possessions is a copy of Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” which he inherited from his mother. “She taught me how to cook and entertain at home,” he adds of the person who most inspired him personally.
Bert’s life in retirement is a striking contrast to the fast-paced, dynamic world of ticketing, where he built his career over more than 40 years.
“I actually started my career with Globe Ticket Company (in Horsham, Pennsylvania) when they were starting,” he says. “They were a big, hard ticket printing company, but they wanted to go into computers. I was working at a software company at the time, and they hired me away. My job was to code and write up a computer ticketing product around Select-a-Seat, which was one of the first original products.”
Bert’s Globe Ticket headshot, June 1981.
Bert admits to loving the entertainment side of the business and has taken full advantage of its access. “When Globe Ticket offered me the job, I turned it down multiple times, and then I thought, ‘Wait a minute, I could go to as many Bruce Springsteen shows as I want if I get into this industry.’ And what's so complicated about putting one butt into a seat?”
He has put his own butt into plenty of seats since then, especially at his favorite venue, Madison Square Gardens.
“I have seen so many shows there. I had a great relationship with Bobby [Robert] Beatty at the time. I did a project at one point with the Garden … I also just saw Red Rocks. It is a magical experience. You add music you love and then put yourself in that environment. It's also something that shows the government did something good. It was paid for as a WPC/CCC Project when Roosevelt was spending, trying to recover from the depression.”
The act Bert saw during his first visit to Red Rocks was Joe Russo's Almost Dead.
“They play a lot of Dead music,” he says of the Grateful Dead spinoff. “If you're familiar with that music, it’s a jam band, and at that concert, they jammed, and they went to places that were just different and creative. They say Almost Dead because it's like the Dead, but it's something more or different … [The offshoot projects are] almost like classical music in the sense that you hear different composers, conductors, and orchestras take that catalog of music and play it again. They make changes and emphasize different parts of it. Somehow, the Dead ended up creating this body of music where it allows other musicians to interpret … The thing is improvisation. Bob Weir (a founding member of the Grateful Dead) talked about it like diving for pearls. You go underwater, and a lot of times, you come up empty-handed. I like the boldness of that kind of musical path.”
Bert adds, “I've been to many Grateful Dead shows over the years. I wasn't following behind them in a VW bus, but I went to a lot of shows. I love blending the genres, the jamming, the lyrics that open up your mind to hear them in different ways, the rhythms and the improvisations.”
Bert with INTIX friends Francine “Frankie” Accardi-Peri (who headed mail-order ticketing operations for the Grateful Dead) and Phoebe Joecks.
Like many live event professionals, Bert could not name a single live event that stood out among all others.
“You’re asking a tough question to be decisive,” he says, then pauses momentarily. “Live Aid in July 1985. I went to JFK Stadium in Philadelphia. That was a really important [show]. [And] Springsteen. I saw him at the Bottom Line in 1975, just before he released Born to Run. And Grateful Dead. I have seen many great shows. I'd say of the Dead shows, [it was when] I saw them at RFK Stadium in 1973. Somehow, it just sticks with me.”
After five years as Vice President at Globe Ticket, Bert bought the ticketing system from Globe with his partners and formed GIS Systems, Ltd. “We built it into a pretty important computerized ticketing company, actually two,” he says proudly. “[We had] a large network in Florida and also the computerized systems for a wide variety of situations from a distribution network to baseball teams and then ultimately Carnegie Hall.”
Bert would go on to consult for Carnegie Hall for four years until early 1994. That was when New York City was about to host the annual Gay Games in which more than 10,000 athletes from 44 countries would participate. Bert became the director of ticketing and soon faced one of the biggest challenges of his career.
“We had built and scaled Yankee Stadium based on a setup of the stage for the closing ceremonies where the highest-priced tickets were meant to be the best view of the stage,” he recalls. “Well, the day they came in and set up that stage in Yankee Stadium, they completely blew out any good seats where we had sold the highest-priced tickets. I had to go outside the ticket office and face these very angry people, who now I had to deal with and re-seat.”
Bert says he learned from that experience the importance of keeping one’s head when under stress, which is a trait he has always valued in colleagues. “I think of this poem by Rudyard Kipling; it’s called ‘If.’ And that's, ‘If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.’ I’ve seen and had to deal with that … Things go wrong, and I think it’s really important to have the ability to stay calm and deal with it.”
He adds, “I also put the first ticketing system in for the Boston Red Sox. They went from hard tickets to computers. All the ticket sellers were just learning the system when we went live, and the entire 81 games went on sale. I was on-site, and the line left Fenway Park and went all the way around the block more than a few times. The box office manager at the time, Arthur Moscato, with a cigar in hand, came out, walked the line, talked to everybody, and kept everybody calm.”
After the Gay Games, Bert settled into the next and longest phase of his career. He spent over three decades as the owner of Picot Entertainment Systems, a business and ticketing technology consultancy with clients that included Madison Square Garden, the Lincoln Center, the Sundance Film Festival, the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Swedish National Theater and many others, including both large and small organizations, and for-profits to not-for-profits.
Bert got involved with BOMI (now INTIX) early in his career when he was still part of GIS Systems. “My partners at the time would register [for the conference], and we had a booth there,” he reminisces. “I would spend a lot of time getting our software ready for it.”
Bert, left, with the GIS team at their BOMI booth.
After setting out on his own, Bert was so inspired by Pat Spira that he started to attend every conference. “Pat was such an influence [and mentor] for me,” he says. “She's inspired me on many levels. Pat created this community of ticketing professionals. She also gave me confidence through a belief in my abilities and support of my work … We had a very good, close relationship, and I respected her greatly.”
Bert also discovered the importance of networking, which led to new opportunities within INTIX itself.
“When I went from being a technical guy to the experience of being a box office person, I realized the software you're writing could benefit greatly by having input from ticket office professionals. There was a book I read early on in my career called ‘The Inmates Are Running the Asylum,’ and that was when ticketing systems and many software systems were being written by programmers to do jobs, and they had no clue what those jobs entailed. INTIX opened up to me both the ability to listen and learn from ticket office professionals who were doing the ticketing business process and then, being a technical guy, to think about how I could help them. Socially, INTIX is a great place to be with colleagues and build relationships. I value the community, and I can share my experience. I presented a lot at INTIX over the years. Along with a guy from Ticketmaster, I was the first presenter to talk about the internet, and with Pat Spira’s go-ahead, I registered INTIX.org and built the first website as a contract.”
Bert and Dori Daniels at INTIX 2024 in Las Vegas.
In addition to discussing the internet at the INTIX conference in the mid-90s, Bert highlights implementing computerized ticketing systems in Queensland, Australia, as one of his most memorable career achievements.
“Their first day of sale was Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers. At the time, when systems are new, they weren't perfect,” he recollects. “I remember thinking, I am in the box office, people are getting really stressed out, and I’d say to myself, ‘Well, nobody really died from ticketing, so keep calm, solve the problem and go to the next one.’”
Bert feels that the INTIX community is the most important thing he gets from the association. “[But] I also get the ability to see how the industry and the technology has changed. I always saw that ticketing people were not just ticketing people. They were much more, including marketing, customer service and business. They intersected in so many different ways. INTIX is the perfect place to see those things come together. I always like to see how things connect. I think INTIX is a great place for us in the industry and how things connect now.”
Bert with Elvis (Shawn Robertson) at INTIX 2024 in Las Vegas.
Even though he is “pretty much retired,” Bert still uses INTIX to keep his finger on the pulse of the industry and share his knowledge with younger members.
“I go to the conferences and participate in the weekly Wednesday Wisdom calls,” he says. “INTIX gives me an opportunity to share some of my experience and talk to colleagues. I’m very much into artificial intelligence (AI) right now, and I use it a lot in everything I do. I rarely go to a Google browser and key in a question. I'll go to a number of AI tools to see what answers they provide. I appreciate when I sit down and talk to a colleague, I hear what they're doing and I like thinking ahead of the crowd if you will. That helps me feel relevant. Over time, I’ve met some younger people in the industry that I could help by introducing them to people. I’ve had a few contacts at the last couple of conferences where I reached out to somebody new, like a first-timer, and shared my experience or said, ‘You ought to talk to so-and-so.’ I like being able to do that.”
Bert and conference showgirls at INTIX 2024 in Las Vegas.
What Bert loved most about his work were the daily challenges, installing computerized systems at different venues and the people he met as a result. He valued colleagues for their humor, integrity and positive attitudes.
“[I enjoyed] interacting with the women in Florida who had to keep their heater under their desk to 60 or 70 degrees when it was 60 degrees outside. They were just learning to use a computer. The people in the box office at Carnegie Hall who found a way to make a joke or have a laugh about something that could have been a serious situation, but they were able to do that. I enjoyed hearing their stories and seeing them. They were always very focused on the customer … I think resiliency is an important category. People who are empathetic and put themselves in other people's shoes … And as for our industry, it’s entertainment. It’s about people having emotional, spiritual and carefree times together. It builds community.”
Along the way, Bert says the people who most inspired him were intelligent and took risks.
“I remember when I was working for a company called Data Point, and one of their vice presidents in charge of technology came up and introduced the idea of computers talking to each other on a network,” he says. “I thought, wow, that guy really stepped out of one realm of thinking and into a different one. People who look at the big picture in a given situation inspire me.”
And, if he had it to do all over again, is there anything he’d do differently?
“I’d be less of a perfectionist,” he says quickly. “I used to think that I needed to be perfect all the time, and now I don’t have to be perfect most of the time. It’s more about getting a good job done rather than a perfect job.”
If he were given three wishes today, Bert would be both practical and hopeful.
“Restoring my hearing would be number one,” he says. “I have hearing loss from being treated for cancer when I was in my 20s. I'm finding it more difficult now to actually hear. So, if somebody gave me one wish right now, I would wish for my hearing back. I like to travel, so I would like to have a longer life so I can do some of that, and I would like the new administration to forget the promises they made to get elected and do the right thing for the country.”
For now, Bert is content to spend time with his friends and family. What does he value most in his friendships?
“I would say loyalty, especially in difficult times,” he remarks. “I live on the West Coast now, but when I fly back to New York, I see friends I have known since kindergarten. I see other people I have known since I was nine years old. These friendships pick up where they left off from not being in touch every day. I'm not a big phone person, so I appreciate that.”
Bert likes helping others to be their very best. “If I see somebody with talent, I like saying, ‘Can I help you be your better self?’ I like that.”
He also had a few additional thoughts to add as we wrapped up. “Once I retired, I took acting and improv classes to exercise the right side of my brain. I always admired ticketing professionals' ability to perform. Finally, if anyone is interested in exploring the possibility of developing standards, both technical and business, I am interested in talking to them. From the early days of the internet, I envisioned and made a proposal to the [INTIX] board to begin a project for technical standards. Other priorities in my life took over, and sadly, I didn't pursue this.”
There is no time like the present, Bert. And for anyone interested in exploring standards, you will have a wonderfully enthusiastic ticketing pro to collaborate with.
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