The view from my apartment window in Hartford. I was on the tenth floor this time instead of the usual fourth floor apartment and I had a better view.
These little trips are always so intense; packing, taking along some food and some coffee – whatever I might need for two days – the drive, toting everything 5 blocks to the apartment (this time in extremely cold and windy weather) unpacking, eating a frozen dinner, then off to the theater to take notes. The next day; writing up the notes, packing everything up, cleaning up the apartment, disposing of the trash, wheeling my suitcase 5 blocks or so to my car (which was in a parking structure right next to the theater), then grab a bite to eat because I won’t get home until 7 pm, then four hours of rehearsal and notes for the actors. Back in the car for a two hour drive home. None of it is difficult, necessarily, just a change from my low-key everyday life. Don and I have these kinds of days when we’re employed and then we go through re-entry when we’re back home. I’m grateful, of course, for employment and for the chance to change things up a bit, to interact with the actors and technicians. Keeps me sharp! It’s all good.
Most of the way home yesterday, I got to watch the most beautiful sunset! It was at its peak as I headed toward the Hudson River. Just gorgeous.
Jane Eyre looks good – they’re still in the middle of previews, those performances that are pre-opening night. That means they still rehearse during the day. The actors are pretty tired out at this point, so they will be looking forward to their day off tomorrow.
During Friday’s performance, a woman’s cell phone kept going off. She happened to be two seats away from me. Once? Okay. We all make mistakes. Three or four different times? No. The worst was when it kept ringing and ringing and I watched her push little buttons and look perplexed and STILL it kept ringing. This went on for a couple of minutes. I finally turned to her and said, “You have GOT to turn that off.” She responded that she was trying. Most cell phones have a button you can hit that will silence the phone. Maybe she was unfamiliar with the phone? Familiarity wouldn’t have been an issue if she had just turned it off before the show started.
Here’s the thing: There is an announcement at the top of the show reminding everyone to turn off their phones. It started to dawn on me, and I had this confirmed by one of the actors in the show, that in spite of the announcement, most people nowadays don’t turn them off. They put them away, or hide them, but they’re still on. The fact that they feel they can’t turn off their phones for a couple of hours for a live performance is a sad one indeed. The actors say that they can see the blue screens from the stage. So can fellow audience members.
I watched the people who were seated in our section – they were aware of the phone going off, clearly, but I realized they had now become used to this kind of thing happening. They accepted it. So, is this now going to be the norm?
It’s so disrespectful.
I found myself wishing that Patti Lupone had been there. Patti Lupone, who famously got so frustrated with an audience member’s constant texting during a performance that she reached down and took her phone away.
Here’s her quote from an interview: “We work hard onstage to create a world that is being totally destroyed by a few rude, self-absorbed and inconsiderate audience members who are controlled by their phones. They cannot put them down. When a phone goes off or an LED screen can be seen in the dark it ruins the performance for everyone else – the majority of the audience at that performance and the actors on stage. I am so defeated by this issue that I seriously question whether I want to work onstage anymore. Now I’m putting on my battle gear over my costume to marshal the audience as well as perform.”
Don has said much the same thing – he has experienced it over and over again. It has soured him on theater; this, after over 50 years in the theater. It obviously wasn’t an issue during my acting days, but it sure as heck is now. As it is, when I’m attending a performance or working at a performance, I have had to remind people to turn their phones off more times than I can count. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of educating someone who doesn’t realize that the actors can see the blue screen. But most of the time, it’s because that person is so tethered to the phone that he or she simply cannot turn it off. That, my friends, is an addiction.
Today: laundry, cleaning, reading – the usual.
Okay. I have to hit Publish.
Happy Sunday.
I have come t detest cell-phones and what their obsessive use is doing to civil society. Yes, I know people “need” them, and that’s partly because there are no public pay phones any more. Bit by bit, people are being forced to buy services that used to be part of the public common (Lexus lanes, are another example). That people prefer to interact with a device over other people is pathetic.
I’ve gone to a few concerts lately and always someone is either filming (against the house rules) or checking their phones. Those glowing screens so detract from focus on the performers that I feel the user should be thrown out. Or some performers, including Dave Chapelle and Jack White require cell phones be bagged. I love it!
Good point about the lack of pay phones as a result of cell phones. And good for Dave Chapelle and Jack White! Thanks, Cara.
We were at “Dear Evan Hansen” on Friday night (amazing!!) and while I didn’t see or hear any phones until the end, when many took them out to capture the actors as they bowed (I’m okay with that moment), what I did keep seeing is lights from peoples watches that were clearly indicating they had received a text or email …. why???? I love turning off my phone when I’m driving, at the theatre, shopping, eating, once I’m ready for bed. It’s always a bit unnerving as my mom is in care, but her health is good and I always figure they will contact my dh or dd, who are also POA’s for her, if something drastic has happened. I LOVE the freedom of not being connected! I have students in my practice and often have to now give some boundaries around phones and watched while we’re working. I appreciate we can all be contacted so easily but value my quiet, precious time too!
Enjoy your re-entry. Hope the rest of your weekend goes well.
X Chy
Watched not watched! Oops!
Watches …..
xo
xo
I have seen the watches light up, as well, rather recently. I can’t remember where, but it was annoying!
Thanks, Chy.
All performances at Galveston’s Opera House are introduced by the director or another staff member and include the reminder that glowing screens distract both actors and audiences. Most people do turn their phones off, but just recently I sat behind someone with a smart watch – Aieee! On a happier note, I attended boarding school in my mother’s Hudson Vally hometown. We watched many glorious sunsets from our study hall high on a hill above the river, a distraction of a more sublime sort.
Those smart watches are truly annoying, Margaret! Sunsets over the Hudson are so beautiful. Thanks, Margaret!
I love Patti LuPone. She just says it — and she’s right. That had to be so annoying! I think I would have grabbed the phone from her. I understand her frustration trying but yes, they do announce and everyone should check. I don’t even take a phone to the theatre. Well, I don’t carry it anywhere unless in a more precarious situation or traveling. It’s not so bad not being attached.
Glad you are home safe and sound and that the show is doing well. Now, just chill!
I think it’s refreshing to be ‘unattached’ for a couple of hours or so! Or maybe…an entire weekend!
Thanks, Jeanie.
Oh my goodness…One Sunday a woman left church service and going down the aisle TWO TIMES…she said hello into her cell-the same Sunday someone’s phone kept ringing. I turn mine off when I go into church and/or performances…
The worst-sorry-but it was…a few years ago, standing in line at the funeral home, and the man in front of me kept talking on his cell about the long line…etc…I thought I would cry…I gave him a look like, Really???? He was obtuse and kept on…If one is going to pay respects at a funeral home, wait in line, can’t one be somewhat respectful? If not, stay home…Sorry but this is one of my aggravations. I taught school, and I made sure the kids kept theirs off. Not easy…
Glad you are home and also got to work.
At church and a funeral???? What is with people? It’s so tasteless and disrespectful. Unbelievable!
Thankfully, when I was teaching in undergraduate and graduate school, phones hadn’t taken over the way they have now. I would be out of my mind if they kept pulling out their phones! Good for you, Brenda.
Knowing we may be called for a genuine emergency it is our rule to reserve seating at the back of the venue or at the very least on the end seats of a row. We keep pagers on low vibrate, do not use a glowing screen, and keep all of it out of sight. We quietly exit before answering and we do not return until there is a break. No one is even aware we have been called. We have never answered or placed a call inside an auditorium. It is simply not necessary.
But, my husband has boldly asked others
around us who are doing nonsense texting to put their phones away before the performers
take the stage. Perhaps this attitude is born of both of us having performed in concert
but more likely it is a sense of common courtesy to performers and the truly engaged audience.
At the same time I confess I have been asked not to laugh on a commercial air
flight because a male passenger a few rows away found laughter disruptive. So apparently
life is complex in every venue.
Somehow, asking someone not to laugh seems a bit much…
Thanks!
Wow, I haven’t been to the theater for a long time, so I had no idea the phone thing was this bad. I just know how much it bugs me in my personal life, even at home, when I can’t get my husband’s attention due to his preoccupation with the phone. Or I can be having a nice conversation with someone and they keep looking/glancing at their phone, as if to say the phone is a whole lot more important than I am, in the flesh, right in front of them. These phones and the people with addiction to them is, in my view, a very big problem for our society. And I’m flabbergasted by the number of people who still look at their phones and text, WHILE DRIVING. And you can tell when they’ve slowed down for no reason, or don’t make a turn quickly, they’re not engaged with the car and the road; they’re engaged with their phone. Just don’t get me started on these phones. I’ll be standing in line at the bank or the pharmacy and have to nudge someone to move along in the line, and then they look up from their phone with zombie eyes, like they’ve forgotten where they are at the moment; in another world, not this one. The world of their phone.
There are days when I encounter rudeness other than phones. I had one of those yesterday. I was standing at the post office counter and there was an annoying woman in front of me who questioned the clerk over and over again about a package she was mailing and she was clearly a nervous, pushy sort; I felt something was not quite right. She left the window, they called me forward and this woman continued to come back and interrupt…THREE times, leaning over me. I finally stood to the side and looked to see if the other window was open. (By the way, peculiar; the post office clerks had some sort of coveralls over their clothes/uniforms and were wearing gloves to their elbows; freaked me out; I guess it’s a hedge against the coronavirus; same thing when I went to Starbucks [a rare treat; I got a gift coupon for Xmas!], new thing with even the person taking my money at the drive-up window; GLOVES. This is SoCalif; maybe it’s diff here than in other U.S. states.)
Anyway, yeah, yesterday; how many times did somebody turn right in front of me while out in the car? Blowing past a stop sign; sheesh. Pulling out of a parking space and not even looking.
Must have been something in the water. And I was in a restaurant drive-thru where two lanes merge and a woman in a van plowed right ahead, nearly clipping my car trying to ram in ahead of me in line although I was definitely the next one IN the line. What’s up with people? And I find they can be militant as well; defensive.
I was at a medical lab a few weeks ago and talking with the medical technician, having already signed in, and we couldn’t complete a sentence without a woman standing next to me at the counter (who’d come into the lab after me) CONSTANTLY chatting/complaining out loud (to the air) and then interrupting us as she seemed to struggle to sign in (keypad) but it wasn’t because she wasn’t intelligent, merely in a hurry and resentful they made her do it, although that’s just the procedure (she struck me as a real snob; hoity-toity). I was down to the wire with fasting for bloodwork, and their cut-off time for lunch was mere minutes away; there was a issue with my order/paperwork … after this other woman broke into our conversation like four times, forcing the med tech to acknowledge her, and even though I was taught to be more polite myself, and there were other people in the lobby, I turned quietly-enough (but ‘not happy’) to this disruptive, self-absorbed woman and said, “Could you just wait a minute; let me finish here, and then you’re next.” (Or something to that effect.) Somebody in the lobby groaned, as if to say I was myself being rude, but, you know, I’d just HAD it, maybe something like what you encountered with the woman who couldn’t/wouldn’t turn off her phone.
I guess as I age, I have less tolerance for a few things in life. It doesn’t take so much to encounter people in public and have politeness and decorum; some reserve. (I felt I’d been polite with that woman long enough, I guess!) I also think some people just want to call attention to themselves. Are arrogant. Self-focused. Bullying. Ready to put up their dukes. Why do they feel so emboldened in such a negative way? There’s too much impatience. And I agree with what is sometimes said that we continue to lose civility over the past four or five years with the current administration in Washington; it’s like a creeping disease to be surly, coarse; the name calling; etc. A lot of people have lost their manners; younger ones aren’t being taught their manners. It’s why when I actually SEE good manners, I’ll call it out and tell someone thank you, like if an adolescent kid opens a door for me when my hands are full of parcels/bags; that sort of thing. They need to know that courtesy is good, and don’t ever lose that good way to be…
…I’m rambling, but it sure doesn’t seem like people are ‘together’ and calm in a lot of instances these days; everybody on edge… I’m old enough now to remember when it was different (and better)…
It’s all very sad. When you can’t go to a movie or the theater or the ballet or the symphony without the intrusion of phones or Apple Watches, etc., you gradually stop going. Thanks, Vicki.
You. have managed to make Hartford look beautiful!! Thank you! It is discouraging that we have become so addicted to our devices that we can’t turn them off or leave them in the car when we’re in a theater. I am very poor at technology but I know how to put my phone on airplane mode. But we feel free to speak on them, at high volume, wherever we are, no matter what subject or who is around or close we are standing in line or in cafes. Sometimes I am tempted to get involved in the conversations. Can’t imagine what it must be like for performers to put so much effort into something and see so many not only not paying attention but disturbing the experience. Very sad and another symptom of the rampant lack of civility we live with. Hope your time at home is calmer and restoring.
I’ve walked by people talking loudly on their phones in a bookshop or store and said “Thanks so much for sharing.” My sarcastic attempt to remind them that they are being rude. Of course, this never works, because they don’t care. They’re oblivious. Thanks, Nora.
I totally agree with you on the phone issue. It’s so sad how disrespectful our society has become over these devices. I haven’t been to a movie theater in almost a year, but my phone goes off when I get there. I would do the same if I were at a play, church/temple, etc.
Of course you would. There are many benefits of our high tech world, but there are far more shortcomings, I think. Thanks, Melanie.