We all know about the intellectual shift in this country over the past eight years. It's been more about who you'd like to have a beer with than who you'd like to have a conversation with about the arts, or culture, or any of that long-haired, high-brow, nose-in-the-air, hippy stuff! Please follow me below the fold for a little re-education...
It's nearing the end of the first half of the school year, and with it comes all of the school choir and band concerts. Many of these concerts could easily win a broken clock award for the length of time a parent is challenged to act like, well... adults.
Being a semi-professional musician, educator and parent, I have oodles of experience sitting on hard seats, listening to the sweet sounds of squawking horns and breathy voices in a middle-school gymnasium. Sometimes it is a joy. Sometimes it is a test of endurance. In all cases there are rules for behavior!(yes, that means even for you, Mister I'm-very-important.)
#1 Turn off your f'ing cell phones. We have a general problem in our society with people being impolite about cellphone use. At a concert, your cute ringtone is an especially rude contribution to the recording that the instructors making to help educate your child! Shut_it_off! You can give your kid two hours of uninterrupted time. It's in the job description of being a parent.
#2 Act like you are in a concert hall even if your butt is asleep from sitting on the gymnasium bleachers. You are not at a sporting event! The reason you are sitting in a gym and not an auditorium is because your school must, for one reason or another, use the gym to accommodate all of the students and parents.
* Don't bring food and drinks into the concert. No one cares if you didn't eat dinner. You can wait two hours to eat.
* Take off your freaking baseball cap! This is a concert, not a ball game.
* Don't stand up and wave like an idiot at your kid down below. Yeah, it's fun to embarrass your little guy, but you're really just making an ass of yourself.
#3 Shut up. SHUT UP! Just shut your pie hole while someone is talking at the microphone. Please sing or at least quit talking during the Star Spangled Banner, and show some respect for that flag hanging on the wall!
#4 Don't leave when your kid is done. There is a reason that directors put a piece at the end of the concert that has all 200 students playing on it at the same time. Parents think it is just dandy to leave when their kid is finished playing/singing and be on their way. You come in and you stay. That's the way it is. Get over it.
#5 Be on time, or at least polite. We all are late at one time or another. If you are late, wait until a song or piece of music has ended and there is applause before you start stomping up the bleachers! Back to rule #3.... and please shut up when you enter.
#6 Don't applaud in between movements. Yeah, I know some people think that's OK now, but it isn't. If you see indentations on the program under a bold heading, it probably means that there are separate sections for that piece of music. Hold your applause until the end.
#7 Don't applaud for soloists until the end of the piece. The exception to this is at a jazz concert where it is appropriate to applaud as a solo finishes.
#8 Stay away from the recording equipment especially if you are the person coughing and hacking your way through the concert. Wait until applause or at least a noisy drum section to cough if you can possibly help it. If you can't, please cough into the crook of your elbow so we don't have to all share in your joyous mucous.
#9 Turn off the flash and the beeps that your camera makes. The flash is very distracting to the students, director and other audience members. It is also just, plain.... RUDE. Check out your camera before the concert to turn off the cute beeps that it might make when you turn it on and off. If you can't turn them off, then bury the damned thing in your jacket until it's done tweeting.
#10 Finally, please pay attention. The worst thing for a kid to see is their parent dozing while they are nervous as hell in front of all of those people. Show them that music is important enough to hold your attention... more important than texting on your Blackberry. Those youngsters are the next generation of parents that will determine the future of music in our schools. Please respect the work that they have done and their accomplishment for simply having the guts to be up there in front of you and three hundred other parents.
After living for eight years in an anti-intellectual environment, the arts have become even more essential to maintaining our culture and our heritage. Without them, we forget. We forget what it's like to attend live musical events. We forget the thrill of the curtain rising. We forget our incredibly rich musical history. We forget how music can ease the soul and lift the spirit. Budgets are being cut all over this country, and usually the first to suffer from the butcher knife is public school music programs. If you are fortunate enough to have a good public school music program in your area, support it and attend those concerts. Please show our next generation how it should be done.