April 6th, 2009

i love david sedaris, i hate that woman behind me

David Sedaris is one of my favorite authors, so when I heard his lecture series was coming to town I was very excited. Chop got tickets and after a tasty dinner of sushi (and macaroni and cheese, lol), we headed to see him.

When we got there and sat down, we noticed an usher was moving people up and he eventually came over to us and said, “We can move you up to row 13, if you’d like to come with me.”

We weren’t that far back, but 13 moved us up about 20 rows, and who’s going to turn that down? Not us.

Unfortunately, it turns out that greed like that comes with a price. And our price was the most annoying couple on the face of this earth (I SWEAR TO GOD). It wasn’t the oft repeating of his final phrases in his monologues… no, instead it was the piercing, shrieking laughter that made me contemplate homicide. The man, in Chop’s opinion was worse, but the woman was hitting such high notes that now, two hours, vodka and two Tylenol later, I still have a headache.

I finally decided I couldn’t take it anymore and so we decided to move back to our original seats (or any seat far, far away from them). We waited for a break (one story to the next), but unfortunately moving meant saying excuse me to five college students who didn’t get up or move. No, instead they tried to scrunch up their legs.

And alright, the girls were waif-like and so that wasn’t an issue, but the guys were probably Chop’s size and “scrunching” up their knees allotted MAYBE one extra inch of space to move by them. So we both proceeded to say excuse me, step all over them (I almost fell over as I do not have the leg span of Chop) and finally struggle into the aisle.

At this point now I was considering mass homicide. (You go to jail either way, might as well make it count.)

His talk ended about 30 minutes later, and sitting at the far back of the theatre, I realized that proximity to someone reading is not that important, as long as the microphone is turned up high.