Human Cockroaches

The biggest problem with Friday's freak storm (other than the fact that no one came close to accurately telling me how bad it was actually going to be), was that due to its lengthy nature I was forced to break one of my cardinal rules for living in New England: never start shoveling until it has stopped snowing. Normally I would stick to this rule for anything short of a woman in labor, yet Friday afternoon I found myself breaking out the snowblower while the snow was still falling and hoping the end would come before another couple of inches turned my driveway into a skating rink. My only consolation was that it was for a good cause. You see, many months ago I saw that one of my favorite comedians, Mike Birbiglia, was performing his one-man show in Worcester. I ask for and received tickets and Christmas and the show was scheduled for February 8th. For those of you who have short memories, that Friday was the day Nemo came into town and dropped 30 inches of snow as it passed through. The show was rescheduled for March 8th, which as it turns out, was the day Saturn saw fit to gift us with another 17 inches of snow. But the show was still scheduled to go on and I wasn't going to miss it over some stormy weather, so I cleared the driveway and we made our way to Worcester. I'm happy to say once we were on the highway it was an easy trip and the show was hilarious.

The only problem with the entire night was the same thing which is always the problem when you go to see live entertainment - the other people in the crowd. Birbiglia served as his own warm-up act, coming out to thank us for braving the snow and stalling to give people more time to get to the theater by performing what I can only assume is some new material. He also took this time to work in the normal pre-show requests about not taking pictures or recording the show and asking us if we could all turn off our cellphones. He must have made 20 jokes about turning off cellphones and how obnoxious the people who don't do that are. That is why I was extra annoyed when, fifteen minutes into the show, someone's cellphone started going off. Seriously? You just heard the comedian you specifically came to see repeatedly ask you to turn your phone off. Hell, even if you were waiting for someone who was running late due to the weather, the least you could do is put your phone on silent. It literally takes 4 seconds, which means not turning off your cellphone is a conscious decision you make. My phone never rings and I still turned it off just in case. Who needs to be that plugged in anyway? Something tells me that if you were the kind of person was has to always be on call, given the way the roads were, they would have called you well before now. If you don't turn your cellphone off it can only be because you are a dick.

Still, at least the cellphone person was nothing but a distraction and over quickly, which was a dream compared to the guy behind me who talked to his date the... whole... show. Every one of Birbiglia's set-ups was met with a story about how something similar happened to him once and followed by an attempt to guess the punchline. If you aren't going to listen to the show, why even buy tickets? Even worse he was talking at a volume which was just loud enough to be distracting, but not so loud as to disturb everyone around him, just the people in front of him. I must have shot these two people dozens of dirty looks throughout the night (along with other people in my row), but they either didn't care or were too much in their own world to notice. In fact, the only time he stopped talking was when he was laughing and of course he had an obnoxious laugh which sounded like he was trying to hold in a sneeze and failing. Once the show was over my first impulse was to give Birbigs a standing ovation and my second was to whirl around and tell this guy he nearly ruined the show for me. It wouldn't have saved my night, but perhaps would have saved future shows from his act. The only person missing to complete the trinity of annoyance was the guy who sits behind homeplate at a Red Sox game and starts waving.

All in all it was a strange study in human behavior because everyone hates the people who talk in theaters as well as the people who don't turn off their cellphones before a show starts and yet these people still exist. You would think when a culture universally decides it will shun the members of society who act in a certain way people would go out of their way to make sure they never did those activities, but somehow these people continue to pop up. Social analysts have spent years trying to shame these people into changing their behavior, but for everyone one we get to shape up and fly right two more come along to take their place. I can't tell if it is because these kind of people are oblivious to the world around them or if they simply enjoy being assholes. Just yesterday I talked about how every now and again people feel as though they have to go against the grain and it can be good for us, but that really only works when they rebel against a notion which doesn't benefit everyone. I can't think of a single person who would ever be watching a comedy show and thinking, "I wonder what the guy behind me, who isn't funny at all, thinks about this? Also, what kind of ringtone does he use?" So, what I'm really trying to get at is if you are at a show and you don't have a microphone in front of you, please don't plan on speaking to anyone for the next hour. And if you are the kind of person who is afraid of staying quiet for that long, allow me to put your mind at ease by reassuring you that I'm confident when I say your loved ones will probably appreciate the silence.