The Entertainers

Two bits of great entertainment yesterday.

In the morning I downloaded on to my iPod the audiobook "Ricky Gervais' Guide to Natural History". It's $2.99 and lasts for 45 minutes so it sounded like good value. I popped in the ear buds, hit Play and started my walk. I probably won't do that again.

Not because it isn't funny. In fact, parts are very funny, and that's the problem. The world has long ago become used to seeing people walking around with white strings coming out of their ears, sometimes even patting their hips in time with the rhythm of they music they are listening to.

But people tend to forget that you can have more than music coming through the earpieces. So there you have a very sweaty, red-faced plus-sized guy in t-shirt, shorts and a baseball cap huffing his way up a hill and having to stop every once in a while because he is snorting and laughing out loud and it's' impossible to breathe when you do that.

The looks I got were interesting. It was pretty much, "I'm going to act like I am not really watching you, but I will dawdle with taking the groceries out of the car until I am sure you are well and truly past my house and have no intention of coming in here." Greenwich doesn't tend to see crazy street people wandering through our streets, and I suspect I may have triggered some sort of early warning neighborhood watch.

So no more Gervais on my iPod during my walks, even though the recording is crude and rude and occasionally side-splittingly funny. (And it's also very lazy, for it is really just him and his sidekicks sitting in front of a microphone and trying to be funny. Fortunately for them, they are.)

Then last night it was an entirely different type of entertainment. LK and I went with Jason and Lora to a concert by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, the musicians who made the wonderful movie "Once" in 2006. I fell in love with the movie when I first saw it, bought the CD and continue to listen to it regularly, liking it more each time I listened. Obviously, this is true of lots of other people, as well, judging by the audience last night.

I really liked the concert, although I think my age works against me. I didn't mind climbing the four flights of stairs to the back of the Opera House Concert Hall. I figured it was the problem of those sitting by me to deal with the consequences of the sweat that soaked my shirt.

Given my girth, the seats were interesting. Let's just say if an earthquake had destroyed the concert hall and sent us all tumbling to the seats on the floor below, they would have found my body with Seat 18U still firmly attached. Given that the Opera House is a government project, that may have even been a safety feature for all I know.

But the bit that disappointed me most was the acoustics. I know the Concert Hall has good natural acoustics, so what I am really talking about was poor amplification. The mic on the piano was so loud it drowned out Marketa's voice on her solos. And Linda, who didn't know most of the songs, couldn't understand a lot of the words, which was a shame for the kind of music they sing.

The irony, of course, is that in recent years I have become an amplification junkie, turning up the TV and car radio to near maximum volumes some times in order to hear the program. So for parts of last night to be too loud must mean that it was really, really loud. It's interesting that Jason and Lora didn't have a problem with the amplification, and both said just about every concert they go to is just as loud. All of which makes me thing that this ear-budded, loud amped generation of our kids is going to be even more stone deaf than most of us boomers who used to crank up our stereos to vibrate-the-floor levels.

Don't take all this to mean it wasn't a good concert. I thought it was very, very good. But the crankiness that comes with getting older seems to be setting in -- $32 for parking, getting all sweaty climbing to the tight seats high in the back, and listening to the piano drown out the voices made me understand and agree with Linda when she said later on, "I had a really great time. But I don't think I want a really great time like this again."