Just when I think I’ve seen it all, I haven’t.
The Source
Just when I think I’ve seen it all, I haven’t. I was playing for a funeral in the Decatur area recently, and had been asked to sing the deceased person’s favorite song. It’s a strange enough funeral when they ask me to sing, but things got even stranger when a woman sitting just two rows from the piano got a cell phone call during the song. She answered the phone. She talked to the person on the other end of conversation. The entire congregation saw and heard what was going on, so I sang a bit louder to overcome the idiot. I guess I was bothering her because she then began to talk more loudly. At one point she actually said, “I can’t hear you. I’m in a funeral.” After the service the lady had no idea what a disturbance she had been. She said, “I want you to play for my funeral some day.” I told her it’d be my pleasure. I wanted to suggest that we schedule it for the following week. I’m currently rehearsing a play at Springfield’s Hoogland Center. Every night I pull into Jacksonville to pick up my little carload of four brave actors and we take off across the Interstate. I’ve done plays in far-flung places and of course the downside is the nightly drive to and from the theatre. But, I thought, this time I’ll have four others in the vehicle with me. Conversation! Nope. My three young charges each have their handheld devices and are glued to them from the moment we leave J’ville until we pull onto Sixth Street. I’m thankful that the oldest member of our road crew travels device-less and we can chat, but as to group conversation, it’s sadly dead. A lost art of traveling. In this particular play, every actor is onstage every minute. No one leaves the stage. Some of my performers act like I’ve deprived them of oxygen. When I tell my cast to take a break after the first couple of hours some of them dash to retrieve their cellphones. Imagine tossing a goldfish onto the sidewalk. The looks are the same. And no, these are not only the teenagers in the cast. And yes, many of the phone calls are from mothers, fathers, sisters, and children….folks who know perfectly well where their errant relative is on that particular night. One night we were gathered around the piano learning the music for the show’s next song. I saw a bit of squirming and moved to see a young Springfield actress texting while she was singing. Actually, she wasn’t singing very much. As recent studies have proven, no one can really multi-task. You can either give you attention to one thing or to another. Last year cell phone users who thought they could multi-task killed a thousand people on the highways. Almost 500,000 were injured. Most of these killers were in the 30-39-age bracket. It’s not just the kids. USA Today recently ran an article about a college professor who said that he was one of the few on his faculty who would not allow texting during class. Huh? I had to read it three times. That’s what he said. Some mommy and daddy are shelling out $20,000 a year for Suzie to text her friends during Econ. 101. In some Asian universities cell phones in class mean automatic expulsion. Here in the land of the free we buy Junior a fancier phone for Christmas. My friend told me this story and she’s just audacious enough that I believe it. This gal is a middle-management executive, dresses smartly, she’s well read, and a wonderful conversationalist. In other words, she’s no whacko. …quite. She tells me that for months whenever she’d been in a fancy restaurant and someone in her business luncheon would interrupt things to take a cell phone call, she’d say, “No problem,” and get up to go to the restroom. “But that wasn’t getting their attention,” she said. “Now I take out my nail polish, hike one leg over another and paint my toenails while they gab.” I love it. Okay, do I have a cell phone? Yep. I’m not sure where it is and I have no idea of my own number, but I have one. I also have an ironing board and I don’t use it much either. In fact, the chances of my shirt needing emergency ironing is about the same as my odds of really needing to use my cell phone. You see, I use this trick….I have a memory. I plan. I call before I leave home. I know, it’s amazing. I learned the trick back in grade school.