Can You Hear Me Now?

The Source

A good friend of mine recently told me, “Did you know you’ve written about that twice now?” I said, “Yes, because I’m still mad.” I had promised myself that I was going to bury this topic forever because all it does is make me more angry to put it on paper and it doesn’t change anything so why bother? But I can’t help it. I was sitting in the back row of the Sophie Leschin Auditorium a few weeks ago, listening to the speaker ask the audience to please turn off their electronic devices. You’ve heard the speech. A whole sea of green and blue screens popped up out of the darkness. Of the 200 people in the audience, apparently none had thought to do this ahead of time. Then I noticed….her. She was sitting right beside me. Perhaps 25 years old, pretty, blond. She took out her cell phone and began texting. I thought okay, she’s ending a conversation with someone. The house lights went down. The play began. She kept on texting, her blue screen lighting up the back wall. She texted all the way through scene one. Scene Two: She was still texting. Any sound man knows that a single cell phone will absolutely kill the reception on an actor’s microphone as the radio frequencies often bleed over into the next wave length. She kept texting. I don’t do this very often…heck, I’ve never done this, but I leaned her direction and whispered, “You’ll need to shut that off.” She looked at me as if I’d just asked for the birthright to her children and said, “It’s just my phone.” “They asked us to turn off our phones.” “But it’s my phone.” And here’s where I did not give the speech I’ve always wanted to give and play out the violent crime I’ve always wanted to commit. I simply said, “I’ve spent the last two years of my life on this show.” “You wrote it?” “Yes.” “Oh.” And she moved to the other side of the auditorium, light from her cell phone illuminating her path like she was an usher who’d suffered some sort of nuclear radiation accident. Surprisingly, my emotion was not anger. It was shock. This girl could not…I repeat: She Could Not Exist without her cell phone being on. It was her oxygen. She would die without it. I had just asked her to stop eating and breathing. I have no doubt that she slept with it on all night and panicked every time she had to take a shower without it. Two nights later…the same auditorium…I saw another dreaded sound killer pop out and I walked in the direction of the electronic glow. A lady was checking her email. Friends, this was not a gum popping mind-numbed teenager, but a lady in her seventies! Gray hair, conservative blouse and skirt, Republican-Baptist-God-Fearing-Potluck-Going-Grandchild-Kissing-Book-Of-The-Month-Club salt of the by-golly earth type woman! Okay, maybe she had a cousin dying in Moline and was checking his blood pressure by Google, but I doubt it. She was as clearly addicted to her phone as the blond bimbo two nights earlier. What have we come to? Yes, people are lonely. Yes, friends are good to have. And yes, we like to know what’s going on, but dear God! People laugh when I tell them they have an addiction. They think I’m exaggerating and trying to be funny to make a point. I am not. Look up any definition of the word and the cell phone falls exactly in to category of compulsion…dependence….obsession…craving. And sadly, many people who read this are telling themselves, “Well, you’re right. But I still need it.” Yes, I have my own addictions. I can’t pass up fried catfish, I’m hooked on Anthony Bordain’s travel shows, a little girl’s hug will just melt me, and all my radio buttons are tuned to National Public Radio, but none of these compulsions will cause me to ruin a play, disrupt a speech, cause me to have a head-on crash, or tell my friends that I’m not interested in their conversation. There. I’m done talking about it. Maybe.