Friday, May 30, 2008

WTF is wrong with concert goers?

So, I went to see Flight of the Conchords last Tuesday with a friend at the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco. We got to the show, sat in our seats, and were getting ready to enjoy the opening act, when an argument about seating and seat numbers breaks out behind us. Fair enough, we think, there must be some mix up. They will surely clear it up in a minute though, right? No. Five minutes of increasingly heated arguing ensues, over the opening comedian, until finally the ushers show up. Thank god, right? No. The ushers apparently can't make heads or tails of the situation either, and instead of offering to re-seat one of the parties, or getting the managers (or even the cops; by this time a lot of belligerent swearing was going on) they instead toss their hands up in the air and just walk away, leaving the two parties to continue arguing loudly, ruining the experience for everyone around them. Now, I don't know exactly what the confusion over the seats was, or who was at fault (though in my book the house was at fault for not at least moving the parties to resolve the dispute elsewhere), but, it is at this point that the apparent leader of one of the parties, whom we shall call 'racist-jackass' going forward, muttered about the leader of the other party (who happened to be a group of two Indian men and one woman), "God, what a Jew." I was obviously aghast, and my friend, being from Texas (a carry-conceal state, where you don't say shit like that because anyone could be armed), visibly braced for gun-fire. I don't know if the Indian guy that the fallacious epithet was directed at didn't hear it, or what, but he didn't seem to react. I have to imagine he didn't hear it, because he was pissed off enough already that we were sure a fight was about to break out anyways. Now, I don't care who you are, or how in-the-right you think you are, but that is, very obviously I would have thought, not something you really ever should say... even ignoring the blatant cultural-social-religious inaccuracy! (I understand he didn't mean it in a literal sense, but still, come on!). And then, as icing on the unbelievably-stupid-cake, racist-jackass's girlfriend says, "Yeah." Really? 'Yeah' is your response? Not, I don't know, "Jesus, shut the fuck up, we're in public."? Who are you people? We left after the main show and before the encore because we did not want to be around when the physical fight finally did break out. Because we left early though, I can entertain the fantasy that after the show the two parties reconciled, were able to see the situation from each other's points of view, and apologized to each other and everyone around them. Yeah.

-100 points to The Masonic Auditorium's Usher Staff for completely failing to resolve the problem in anything approaching a professional manner.

-100 points to both parties for not being considerate enough to resolve the issue where it wouldn't ruin the experience for everyone around them.

-10,000 points and remedial world civilization classes to racist-jackass and his girlfriend for hopefully obvious reasons.

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