Bad Behaviour at a Show

Forgot to say, hit the jackpot at Aladdin.

Ten minutes in, two girls clamber in late and occupy the two empty seats next to me.

Twenty minutes in, they start unpacking their picnic, which they’d wisely packed at the bottom of their bag, ignoring both me and the people in front turning around and doing their best Paddington Bear Hard Stare^TM.

Twenty-five minutes in, start eating their picnic, and when I say picnic I mean picnic – firstly something else, but then it turns out they’d packed those crisps which are very crunchy (annoying everyone who can hear), and, worse, really, really smelly (vinegary, annoying mostly me). When I notice it’s not just a small bag but TWO entire tubs of the stuff, and because clearly other people were getting antsy too, I lean over and do my best mock-polite whispering “Sorry, that’s quite noisy, would you mind waiting until the interval?”

Forty minutes in, could they heck. Crunch crunch crunch, hard stare goes ignored. I tend to assume people who eat/check phones/whisper often don’t realise how loud they’re being, and tend to be apologetic if you ask. So when these people know they’re annoying a lot of people who’ve paid an awful lot of money to be here but just don’t give a damn...  I can’t quite remember what I said, but it wasn’t polite. So they put them away, and I relax, because it’s not like they’re going to do anything else to distract me, is it, I can sit and enjoy the sh-oh what the f*** are they doing now...

Out come the f***ing phones. It’s like they were working their way through a list of how to piss people off. The usher comes along (good ushers here, shining their lights on phones) and tells them off, so they graciously acknowledge their fourth wrongdoing of the night and turn it off they stroppily say (not whisper, say) “I’M TURNING IT OFF!” like a bolshy teenager, then somehow take five minutes to find the off button. And you know the best bit? I can see they’re on Facebook, and I’m 99.9% sure they were complaining about how badly I was behaving towards them at the theatre.

Something happened during the interval, and they behaved themselves in the second half, but when people are such arses you keep waiting for them to arse around further – it took a long time to relax into the show. So thanks to those two strangers, I’ve ticked off my year’s bad behaviour bingo card in one bloody hour.

P.S On a lighter note...

Sept 25, 2016 10:50:57 GMT @xanderl said:

Not a show, but went to the Abstract Expressionism exhibition at the Royal Academy today and (as often happens) had the experience marred by a few parents who had brought very small children with them who spent the whole time screaming with no attempt by the parents to quieten their little darlings down

And also incidentally a fair few families with nice quiet well behaved children! So not saying don't bring them, but if they are screaming or running about take them out!

One of my favourite experiences in an art gallery was going around the David Hockney ipad art exhibition at the Royal Academy, some three or four years ago now. Whilst pretentious sods like myself were staring at a wall full of pictures of fairly similar, nondescript, brightly coloured trees and pretending we could see deep meaning within them, a parent turned to his little bundle of joy and excitedly said “I think I can see a Gruffalo in one of those!”.