“…and finally, we’d like to remind you to turn off your cell phones if you haven’t already.”

Right. But coughing and sneezing are potentially equally distracting to the performers on stage and to the rest of the audience, yet you wouldn’t expect to hear the person introducing the concert to ask that you refrain from such acts.

It’s a funny tension. The conflicts between the manners of a refined society and the truths of our bodies. Someone sneezing just as a silent modern theatrical production nears its climax is more excusable than their cell phone ringing. But why? And how much more excusable is it? Are 5 successive sneezes equivalent to 1 cell phone ring in terms of the negative opinions the rest of the audience has towards the person who has sneezed or received a call? I suppose it depends on the ringtone.

There’s this notion that it wouldn’t be appropriate to ask people not to cough or sneeze during a performance because coughs and sneezes cannot be helped. I’m amazed at how often people grunt, cough, or sneeze during a performance. In an auditorium with 200+ seated, not one minute goes by without some noise. I can imagine people trying to hold it in until the performance gets loud, as it would during certain portions of classical music, so that their noise is negligible by comparison. Or people hearing others cough and deciding that now is the best time to put an end to that itch they’ve had in their throat, better to have a furry of coughs from different auditorium locations for a short time than to have coughs spread out over the length of the performance.

I want to go to Japan. There are many things about Japanese culture that I like and feel similar to, one of which is that I think the audiences are quieter there.