Alegria

Went to Cirque Du Soleil’s Ale­gria last night. If you’ve never been to a Cirque show … go.

Any spe­cial you’ve seen on tele­vi­sion pales in com­par­i­son to expe­ri­enc­ing the real thing. Watch­ing a trapeze act imme­di­ately above you is absolutely amaz­ing. I’m still try­ing to digest the expe­ri­ence … and I’ll prob­a­bly be doing that for some time.

The only blem­ish on the entire evening (not count­ing our din­ing adven­ture at the Old Spaghetti Fac­tory … but that’s another story) was the one cell phone that went off in the mid­dle of the per­for­mance (not mine, some other moron’s). As tim­ing would have it, it went off with it’s damned­ably dis­tinc­tive ring dur­ing a qui­eter part of the act … as if proudly pro­claim­ing, “I’m so impor­tant I need to let every­one know.”

I mean, when the show opened, the intro­duc­tion included spe­cific instruc­tions to the audi­ence (loudly and clearly detailed by the young Mon­go­lian actor in Eng­lish more cleanly pro­nounced than many Americans):

• Don’t smoke in the tent
• Don’t take pic­tures or video (the flash and light­ing could dis­tract and be poten­tially dan­ger­ous to the cast)
• Turn your cell phones and pagers off

The last point brought a round of applause from the audi­ence, a seri­ous indi­ca­tion that peo­ple are tired of these self-important, arro­gant ass­holes who feel that com­mon cour­tesy doesn’t apply to them. Ok, ok … so you’re an impor­tant indi­vid­ual … you’ve a job where being “on call” means you have to be con­tactable … I can respect that. But, you can eas­ily get a vibrat­ing bat­tery pack for your phone (I use one myself) that silently alerts you to an incom­ing call. If you can’t turn the phone or pager off, at least think of the peo­ple around you … and not in the way you usu­ally do (“peo­ple who see me tak­ing calls in pub­lic will know I’m an impor­tant person …”).

I mean … think. You impress no one with your phone … get over your­self … you’re no bet­ter than the whin­ing idiots I see in the Usenet news­groups and web­site dis­cus­sion forums crit­i­cally rip­ping every­one else around them apart … yet being com­pletely inca­pable of con­tribut­ing any­thing worth­while to the dis­cus­sion (yes, that’s another story, too).

::deep breath:: Any­way, it was just one phone … so no major issue. In my own jaded way, I was half-expecting there to be more inter­rup­tions, so hav­ing only one was a pleas­ant surprise.

At any rate, I’ve always been amazed at the skill of the per­form­ers in Cirque …

… now I’m a seri­ous fan.