Passionato

I don’t like going to classical concerts much.I mean what's the point of being treated like sheep. What's the point of going to a concert if you're just another audience member pushed around by ushers surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Long Island and New Jersey in their Sansabelt slacks and their Ralph Lauren Polo jackets and their program notes and their Sunday Times, complaining about the drinks - "Oh they don't have Ketel One here, do they, not like at home"  - and stopping at lobby bars selling Fetzer White Zinfandel and fried calamari and their wives sitting in their Chanel suits looking flushed because they overdid it at the cocktail bar. And stopping by the restaurant across the street and if you're not at your table spot on seven you miss the bowl of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine , and being herded into endless Elgar rooms and Beethoven Suites for fund-raising drinks and meet the artist sessions, and bars full of older investment bankers pretending they're acrobats forming pyramids and frightening the musicians and barging into queues, and every Thursday night the restaurant has a bloody cabaret in the bar, featuring a fat washed-up opera singer with forty nine-inch hips and some geriatric pianist with his hair brylcreemed down and a big ass presenting 'Symphonic Sondheim'.

And then some adenoidal old maid  from Park Slope with flabby white legs and diarrhoea tries to pick up a hairy bandy-legged trombonist called Andy and once a month there's an excursion to the Pops concerts to see Steve and Edie Gorme and buy chicken wings and Fetzer White Zinfandel  and one evening you visit the so called Zagat-rated restaurant with local color and atmosphere and you sit next to a party from the Jersey Shore who keep shouting “Bravo’ whenever they see a performer and complaining about the food - "The portions are small, aren’t they?" - and you get cornered by some drunken insurance salesman from Yonkers with a Flip camera and Bally loafers and last Tuesday's Financial Times and he drones on and on about how Sarah Palin should be running this country and how many languages Glenn Beck can speak and then he throws up on your new shoes..

And talking about concerts they don't realize they haven't even been to ("Oh, we saw Mahler’s 11^th last year, it was spectacular. No Ketel One but we've found a charming little local place hidden away in the back streets where they serve Fetzer White Zinfandel and cheese.......”)