A Night at the Symphony

Talk about High Class

I was given two free tickets to the Seattle Symphony recently. I am not a classical music fan, per se but I do have some classical music CD’s and listen on occasion. I could not tell you the difference between Mozart, Beethoven or Brahms, but I thought it would be interesting to hear such complex music played live. Plus, the deal included a free catered reception at a great restaurant beforehand and a wine tasting at intermission.

The one thing I noticed right off the bat is how quiet the audience is once the music starts. It is somewhat eerie how totally still people are, and it became part of the whole experience noticing how absolutely silent everyone is.

Good. Silence is a virtue, etc…

Then it started.

The teeth sucking sound began to my left. It was the sound of someone who has a morsel of dinner in a far back tooth. You know, the sound you make when you have eaten a whole ear of corn on the cob and are afraid to open your mouth lest you have a corn kernel smile.

Now, one or two sucking, smacking slurping sounds are fine. It’s kind of gross, but hey, it’s happens to all of us. Get it out. Move on.

This sucking, slurping and smacking went on for the whole 2 hour performance, at around 2 minute internals. Nonstop. Suck. Slurp. Smack.

At one point, I thought that maybe the” Slurper” had Tourettes. That theory was blown when I isolated the sound as coming from a woman in leather pants, a fur coat, and big old rocks on her fingers. You see, following every few suck, slurp, smack she would dig one long fake fingernail into the same spot on her mouth. As a bonus, every time she did this her ring would catch the light like a beacon. (Had we been outside planes would be trying to land on us after confusing the flashing light from her big old rock with runway lights.). So, she was not disabled, she just did not have the courtesy to give a shit.

It became apparent that other audience members could here “The Slurper”, too. Every 50 seconds a different head in the rows in front of us would turn around craning their necks to see what in the hell was making such a god-awful noise. It became a game to see who would turn around next. Would it be the grey-haired couple on the aisle this time? The lady with her hair in a ponytail? Look, now it’s two rows ahead of us. Benoroya Hall must have amazing acoustical properties to amplify that noise so far into the audience. After one particularly exuberant slurp, I was surprised the conductor did not stop to offer the lady some floss.

At that point, the whole thing became unbelievably funny in one of those Jesus-this-is-the-wrong-place-to-bust-up-but-I-just-cannot-stand-it way; like being at church, a murder trial, or a funereal sort way. I started thinking about depressing things to keep from laughing—sick puppies, Republicans, dead kittens, past romantic failures-- anything to stop from giggling. Then, one of men in front of us got from his chair and ran out of the hall. Clearly, he could not hold his laughter in any longer (or maybe he did not have the same sort of romantic failures than I have had to draw on.)

There is one thing I am sure of had this been monster trucks show the smacker would have had the common courtesy to get a toothpick and take care of it. So much for high-class, eh?