I'm Not Flirting, I'm About to Break Your Face

We had tickets for Ira Glass.  I thought this was appropriate not just because I’m a fan of This American Life, but also because my husband and I each produce and host a weekly radio show.  Sometimes we’re really good at our respective shows and sometimes we suck.  I thought maybe we could learn something.

The evening started sour as I had to physically pry my husband away from his computer to get him to leave the house with me.  En route to a brief, pre-event dinner, he cranked the radio in search of football scores.  Suffice it to say, this was a date-night sans dessert, if you know what I mean.

We settled into our nosebleed seats at the Morrison Center.  The guy to my left kept fiddling with his phone.  The lights dimmed.  The show began.  The man, who I came to think of as “Dick”, continued tapping away on his tiny keyboard.  Incessantly.  Maybe he’s texting a friend for football scores, I thought.  By forty minutes, my blood had reached a full boil.  I tried to turn my gaze into death ray laser beams, but I think he just thought I was flirting with him.  I decided to kill that notion.

“I’m sorry,” I said (which is funny, because of all the things I was feeling, sorry was not one of them), “but are you going to text the whole time?”

“I’m not texting,” he explained.  ”I’m taking notes.”

If a lick of logic entered his brain, he might have realized that a glowing screen in a dark theater where people have paid a lot of money to be present is obnoxious, regardless of whether you view your actions as educational or recreational.  This logic was not present.

“So,” I leaned in a little closer, not to imply that I might brush my lips against his cheek, but to communicate that I could lunge for and rip out a large portion of his neck with my teeth, if I so chose, “you’re going to do this the whole time, then?” I asked.

He put his phone away.

The sad part of the evening isn’t the lackluster date-night or the mood tainted by my anger at neighboring Dick.  The sad part is that I probably could have learned something from Ira Glass, but I was distracted.  Before I went off on Dick, maybe I should have had him text me a copy of his notes.  Hindsight is 20/20, especially from the nosebleed seats.