Common courtesy...it ain't so common!

We are in the thick of band concert season and since C and T are now in different bands, that means keeping track of two very different schedules. Last night E, C and I went to watch T's first concert performance of the season.  It was a special concert since it was the first collaboration between Farrington High School and Hawaii Pacific University. Both bands performed well but our enjoyment was tempered by the behavior of some less-than-courteous audience members. 

During his welcome speech, the emcee reminded the audience of appropriate behavior for a performance of this sort:  if you need to leave, please wait till the end of the song, please turn off your cell phones, please refrain from talking during the performances.  C turned to me at the end of the reminder and said, "People actually need to be told this."  Yes, they do.  Too bad some of them choose not to follow it.

The auditorium was far from full but a family group decided to sit in our row anyway.  The group consisted of four women and two children; the elder was perhaps 9 years old and he decided to go sit way down in the front row for a while.  The younger boy was about 7 and he ended up about 3 seats away from me.  About one song into Farrington's performance, three of the women and the younger boy got into a discussion that seemed to revolve around the use of a digital camera that none of them could figure out.  Things pretty much went downhill from there. 

One of the women just could not shut up.  I don't know what she was saying since it wasn't in English but she had frequent comments to make to the women next to her.  Even if they didn't actively respond, she kept right on talking.  I know a lot of family members aren't really interested in classical music but they do come to support the students.  Except for the incident with the camera, she showed absolutely no interest in anything related to the performance; not the music, not the staging and not the performers. 

It was annoying during Farrington's performance; it was downright infuriating by the time HPU took the stage.  During the brief intermission, the older boy decided to rejoin his group; he plopped down in front of the woman with diarrhea of the mouth and began an animated conversation with her that seemed to revolve around the Nintendo DS he held in his hand.  During HPU's performance, the boy continued to play his game, but did not bother to turn the sound all the way down; HPU played "Danny Boy" in preparation for an Ireland tour they are taking soon.  For those in our row, the beautiful melody was interspersed with "ping, ping, blat, blat, blat, blat" from the DS in the row in front of us.  Diarrhea woman kept leaning over the kid's seat to see what he was doing and making comments to him as he played.  Then her phone rang.  Yes, she answered it.  Yes, she had a short conversation.  Two minutes later, it rang again.  Yes, she answered it and then passed it to the woman next to her.  She, at least, had the grace to look slightly embarrassed in my direction.  She still took the phone and had a brief conversation though.

I videotaped the performance last night and midway through I had a wild urge to swing the camera in their direction and say loudly, "And this is what rude people look like."  With my luck, they would have reacted as if it were a well-deserved photo op.  People like that just never get the point.