More Theatre Etiquette
Tonight at the Ridge Theatre, just seconds before showtime for Loins of Punjab Presents (a riotously funny and cute movie, should you ever have the chance to see it), one of the empty seats to my right was suddenly filled with a guy who slipped into the theatre at the last minute.
Worried about impinging on his personal space, I grabbed my shopping bag and jacket which I'd placed in the seat when it looked like no one else was coming, and put them in my lap and the floor, respectively.
I found out soon enough that I didn't really owe him the courtesy.
Initially I thought things were a little odd when he began laughing self-consciously loudly. Laughing as if to say, "Look everybody, I'm a white guy laughing about a film primarily about Indo-American people! Aren't I awesome!"
But the laughing wasn't just weird in volume. It started to get weird in timing. At least a dozen times throughout the movie, he'd bark out a single, echoing, "HA!" Don't get me wrong — this was certainly a movie chock full of funny bits, but like . . . uh . . . not at the places he was HA-ing. The HAs were a loud disruption in an otherwise silent theatre at those moments.
I started to shift in my seat uncomfortably.
And then I started to shift in my seat very uncomfortably, as our whole seat row pitched back about 10 degrees, and the smell of feet wafted down the row. That's right. The guy had taken off his shoes and put his sock feet up on the seats in from of us, pushing to lean our own row of seats backward.
"HA!" he erupted at another random moment.
"Is he wearing any pants?!?" my wife asked. I glanced over, as casually as I could, to find him slumped down in the seat with his bare legs now entirely draped across the seat back into the seat in front of him. His right hand cradled his crotch. With more peering in the dark than I really cared to be doing I was able to confirm that, yes, he was wearing a pair of those tiny wispy black soccer shorts, but that still didn't explain what his hand was up to.
"HA!" Clap, clap, clap.
Our seat pitched back again.
At least the foot smell had died down a little.
"Listen, you bastard. This is not an effing hockey game! Behave like a grownup!" Ooh, I wanted to shout it so badly. Oh, and lest you assume that the guy was a teenager or something, no, he looked to be about 40.
Finally, at the first note of the end credits song, the guy leapt up out of the chair (giving us one last jarring) and ran full tilt out of the theatre. Despite my long-standing peeve of people running out as soon as the credits roll (don't get me started on the way the audience acted at JCVD last weekend), I've never been so glad to see a movie patron leave.
And I've never enjoyed quietly reading the credits and listening to the end music as much as I did tonight. "Finally," I thought, "we can enjoy the rest of this movie in peace!"
* * *
Incidentally, some RSS aggregators didn't seem to pick up my post yesterday for some reason. It's another one of those long, crazy, and thoughtful west Texas childhood ones, if you're into that kind of reading. I figured at worst I'd tell you and do Bloglines' job for them....
Worried about impinging on his personal space, I grabbed my shopping bag and jacket which I'd placed in the seat when it looked like no one else was coming, and put them in my lap and the floor, respectively.
I found out soon enough that I didn't really owe him the courtesy.
Initially I thought things were a little odd when he began laughing self-consciously loudly. Laughing as if to say, "Look everybody, I'm a white guy laughing about a film primarily about Indo-American people! Aren't I awesome!"
But the laughing wasn't just weird in volume. It started to get weird in timing. At least a dozen times throughout the movie, he'd bark out a single, echoing, "HA!" Don't get me wrong — this was certainly a movie chock full of funny bits, but like . . . uh . . . not at the places he was HA-ing. The HAs were a loud disruption in an otherwise silent theatre at those moments.
I started to shift in my seat uncomfortably.
And then I started to shift in my seat very uncomfortably, as our whole seat row pitched back about 10 degrees, and the smell of feet wafted down the row. That's right. The guy had taken off his shoes and put his sock feet up on the seats in from of us, pushing to lean our own row of seats backward.
"HA!" he erupted at another random moment.
"Is he wearing any pants?!?" my wife asked. I glanced over, as casually as I could, to find him slumped down in the seat with his bare legs now entirely draped across the seat back into the seat in front of him. His right hand cradled his crotch. With more peering in the dark than I really cared to be doing I was able to confirm that, yes, he was wearing a pair of those tiny wispy black soccer shorts, but that still didn't explain what his hand was up to.
"HA!" Clap, clap, clap.
Our seat pitched back again.
At least the foot smell had died down a little.
"Listen, you bastard. This is not an effing hockey game! Behave like a grownup!" Ooh, I wanted to shout it so badly. Oh, and lest you assume that the guy was a teenager or something, no, he looked to be about 40.
Finally, at the first note of the end credits song, the guy leapt up out of the chair (giving us one last jarring) and ran full tilt out of the theatre. Despite my long-standing peeve of people running out as soon as the credits roll (don't get me started on the way the audience acted at JCVD last weekend), I've never been so glad to see a movie patron leave.
And I've never enjoyed quietly reading the credits and listening to the end music as much as I did tonight. "Finally," I thought, "we can enjoy the rest of this movie in peace!"
* * *
Incidentally, some RSS aggregators didn't seem to pick up my post yesterday for some reason. It's another one of those long, crazy, and thoughtful west Texas childhood ones, if you're into that kind of reading. I figured at worst I'd tell you and do Bloglines' job for them....