Dear Woman I Met Thankfully Briefly at a Recent Showing of Evil Dead: The Musical at The Vogue in Vancouver,
First of all, hi. I hope this letter finds you well (I don't, really, but we'll get to that in a bit). I don't know if you remember me; I assume you don't, since you did everything you could at the time to obliterate me from your memory even as I was still speaking to you. If you don't, let me refresh you. I was sitting next to you in about the seventh row at opening night. My friend was between us -- he's a local musical theatre reviewer, and I was his plus-one. You were also the plus-one of a theatre reviewer for a local paper -- quite a high muckety-muck gentleman, too, if I remember correctly, which perhaps betrayed me into expecting a level of noblesse oblige from you that I never received. How silly of me.
It also meant that you received your ticket completely free, at which point the evening should be a wash for you at best -- wasted time, certainly, if you didn't happen to enjoy the play, but nothing more. Perhaps, also, the social annoyance of being forced to rub elbows with the lower classes. I know that when you sign up to join a fairly prominent local theatre reviewer for an evening of musical hobknobbery, you expect something more along the lines of champagne flutes and mink stoles and maybe a monocle or two. What you do not expect are the posse of die-hard white trash girls who sat behind us with chainsaw laughter and obnoxious grunts anytime they recognized one of the lines in the play culled from Raimi's original work, which are plentiful. If I may be frank, though, I would much rather spend an entire evening in the company of those girls than I would ten minutes with you, as I suspect I would have a much better time and probably get tricked into enjoying myself once or twice.
I can't imagine I'd have a worse time than you did, however, surrounded by poor people and musky odors and subpar theatre. Indeed, I seem to remember your leaning over and expressing that sentiment to us: the play was boring and trite and you'd rather be anywhere else, and what did we think of it? And you know what, you're not wrong: the play's not especially good. But, as I told you, I found the over-the-top atmosphere very enjoyable, and I was very much having a good time just watching the reactions of other people and revelling in the whole thing, and maybe just forgetting that the book of the play wasn't great and concentrating on the fact that it was a lot of fun, which it is.
I don't know if it was the fact that my opinion ran counter yours, or the fact that I was gauche enough to wear something as common as a T-shirt, or what it was that made you decide that it was imperative to immediately stop talking to me and begin speaking to my friend. Nor do I know what made it so important that you completely ignore the rest of my contributions to the conversation, or to act like I wasn't speaking at all and begin talking over me to my friend, who just happened to share your opinion on the production. Thank you also for ignoring me the second and third times you spoke to my friend during and after the second act, respectively. I want to assume it was some sort of avant social experiment of yours: an attempt to create a production more awful than the play we were watching. If that was your aim, I applaud you and the subtlety with which you carried out your completely unethical psychological experiment.
If that is not the case however, and I suspect it was not, I think you're just kind of a bitch. So there's that.
Please accept my cordial apologies for: 1) sitting next you or even vaguely proximal to you; 2) answering your question on my opinion of the production in a way that did not suit you; 3) attempting to continue the conversation like a civilized human being; 4) having a sense of humour about myself and in general. I apologise particularly for this last one; we should all strive to attain your level of utter self-seriousness. I suspect that it is something that comes with many, many years of extensive work at being a complete and utter pill. So for that, I salute you, and am duly humbled.
I look forward to seeing you at future productions in the city, of which I am at many, so I can continue to impress you with my perceived lack of intelligence, wealth, and taste. Conversely, I expect you to impress me with your level of still-being-a-bitch.
I am certain you won't let me down.
Kisses,
t.
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