So we went to a performance of Carmina Burana this afternoon. And I have to wonder sometimes if people don’t actually intentionally go to cultural events so much as just get kidnapped from their homes and wake dazed in a theatre somewhere. Because people are so damned rude I could lose my mind.
I know everyone in the world has made these requests, but all the same:
- Turn off your phone. No. Turn it off. The performance is an hour and ten minutes. You’ll live.
- Do you really think your child wants to go see Carmina Burana? Is any cultural enlightenment he or she might pick up (entirely by osmosis, I’m guessing) worth the undying enmity of your fellow concert-goers as they grind their teeth when your kid asks, “Is it almost over?” for the seventy-fifth time?
- Again, it’s only an hour and ten minutes. You can hold it. Stop popping out of your seat like a prairie dog.
- That’s nice that your kid is in the children’s choir, but you’re sitting roughly a quarter of a mile from the stage, so the picture won’t turn out anyways, and you all just blinded the timpanist when your flashes went off at once.
- It’s a program. It’s not a Triple A map. It’s not origami paper. Put it down.
- Shut up. Seriously.
- If you really feel like you need to unwrap a hard candy, could you do it during one of the loud, fast passages instead of during the soprano’s solo?
- When people glare at you the first time you unwrap a hard candy during the soprano’s solo, the solution is not to do it again during the second soprano solo, only more deliberately. Because you know what? Unwrapping a hard candy slowly and carefully is actually louder than the way you just did it.
- No one is making you sit here and listen to music. By the same token, no one cares if you act like an inconsiderate boob when you’re in your own home watching television. Think about it.