Uncommon Courtesy

Last Saturday evening, I was ready for an evening out with the girls.  We were headed to see Other Desert Cities at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts.  Opening night, even!  I love going to the productions on opening night: people dress up a bit, champagne before the show, wine and dessert afterwards.  What’s not to love?

As much as I want this post to be about the show (it was amazing, btw), it’s not.  Instead it’s about common courtesy…or the lack thereof.

I freely admit that I’m someone who looks at their smartphone more often than necessary, and have to remind myself that I don’t have to answer every email immediately or take every call.  By habit, my phone is ALWAYS on silent, because I’m paranoid about being the person whose colorful ringtone goes off at the most inappropriate time.  There are places where I will turn the phone completely off, and the theater (movie or live) is one of them.

I thought it was common knowledge that when you’re attending a live production, you turn your cellphones off and make as little noise as possible so that you don’t interrupt or distract the actors.  They even ask you to do this before the production begins.  So, all bases should be covered, right?  This night, not so much.

During the first half of the show, someone’s phone did go off.  Many heads turned towards the person said phone belonged to, a sure sign that he’d seen the errors of his ways and would turn the ringer off.  Well, it went off again…and again…and again.  By intermission, I wasn’t sure if he’d actually turned it off or that the person trying to reach him gave up.

Unfortunately, the shenanigans continues in the second half…but different people.  Two rows behind me, we heard someone opening…something.  It had to be a plastic bag of some sort based on the crumpling sound.  The slower they attempted to open it, the worse the sound was.  Then, I swear I smelled the aroma of corn nuts (ugh!).  Then came the chomping.  Really?!

Maybe the person in front of me took it as a sign that it was okay to open up snacks, so she did so too!

It took everything to focus on the rest of the play.  I’m surprised my friends and I didn’t get whiplash based on the number of times we looked back at the noise hounds.

 As soon as the lights came up, our first comments, sadly, were not about the play, but about the rudeness we’d experienced.  I apparently missed the worst of it. The friend sitting the furthest from me said that the person next to her was actually on her cell phone.  Not checking messages or texting…on the phone!  She could even hear the person on the other end talking. 

REALLY?!?!?!?

In the moment, I was grateful that the person wasn’t sitting next to me, because I know I would have called her out on it immediately. We finally started discussing the play as we headed downstairs for the reception.  We separated for a few minutes to mix and mingle.  Once I met back up with the girls, they told me they found the chatty cell phone offender and “nicely” confronted her about her inappropriate cell phone use.  I’m glad she did.

Technology will continue to expand and keep us overly connected, but we need to work on preventing common courtesy from going extinct.

What do you think?  Am I right? Overreacting?