You In The Cheap Seats Stop Clapping

There is something to be said for paying for a better seat at the Hollywood Bowl. Not for listening to the music, it's so that you can listen to the music.

For the last two Thursdays, a woman shows up with a male partner and they sit near us. They have a little folding table and an electric candle to place on the table. That's okay, weird but okay. She has some kind of lung condition, in that there are few moments she isn't hacking her lungs up. At one point, during a particular rough batch of hacking, she farted. Yep, a real ripper. But that's not all, she unwraps things, constantly unwrapping one cellophane product after another and hacking with an occasional fart thrown in.

It was a night of flouting flute music with Sir James Galway and his wife playing and near the end of the performance he played, Danny Boy which Mr. Galway introduced with a joke. "If you want, you can say a little prayer while listening. And you know what that will get you. Nothing"

I loved the joke and really liked hearing him play Danny Boy, it's just that I wanted to set the coughing farter on fire while listening to one of the sweetest pieces of music there is.

Sir James Galway, when he announced what he was going to play got a roaring ovation from the cheap seats and that brought out another of his zingers, "You in the cheap seats, stop clapping."

I know what he meant. The unwashed, the rowdy, fart-sneezing-package-unwrappers-bottle-tippers can't stop making noise. Even the people who shush the noise makers make noise. And if it isn't a fucking cough-and-fart woman, it's a damn plane or helicopter droning over head.

Ah, yes, the cheap seats, all the farting coughing you can get for a buck-fifty.