I went to the theatre this Friday. Nice little comedy done pretty well by the students here. More fun that the opera, except that the audience was worse (see last week’s blog about the opera audience). At least no one in the opera audience was playing with their phone the whole time (and my position in the theatre would have allowed me to see that).
A girl behind me at the play had her phone on vibrate. And it vibrated every time she got a text. And then she would take it out and answer right away, leading to a new vibration. I could see a bunch of other people texting and/or playing on their iphones during the production. One boy in particular, who attended with his four friends, did not look up at the stage at all. Even during the fight scene.
This was a small theatre. The actors and I could all see who was looking down and who was bathed in the blue glow of a phone screen.
In other news, have finally got around to reading Madame Bovary. I now understand Margaret Atwood’s line about how Bovary would have been saved by knowledge in double entry bookkeeping. The book exists in cultural imagination as being about adultery. Now, there is adultery. There’s commentary on faith and rural life and what we would now understand as crippling depression. But Madame Bovary is not ruined by her affairs. A loan shark takes advantage of her and her husband–he changes rates and threatens with third party intervention and pretends to be their friend. In the end, she’s dead because she’s bankrupt. If there had never been a money problem, the adultery wouldn’t have been a problem, either.
I have to say, it was much more readable than I anticipated, but I’m glad that I didn’t read it in high school. I hate that “classics” are always given to children, when it takes adults who’ve had money problems and more than one relationship, etc. to really empathize with characters. If I were speaking, I would raise a toast to reading the classics as an adult.
