Seeing Neil Gaiman, and revealing I'm a grump, surprising no one

Last night Jer and I went to Town Hall in downtown Seattle to see the Neil Gaiman interview. We both enjoyed it. We lucked out on parking -- the first time we haven't had to pay for street parking in I-couldn't-tell-you-how-long. We lucked out on tickets -- I'd picked ours up from will call last Tuesday.

The will call lines were long and snaked around the building. We were able to sneak past to the open door.

Our seats were pretty good. Until a couple sat in front of us determined to demonstrate their love throughout the entire show by morphing into a two-headed monster, adept at swinging its joint and giant head in whichever direction best blocked the stage.

I get that you guys loved each other, that's awesome. Love is great. But stop leaning over and kissing each other on the shoulder when you are already six feet tall, sitting directly in front of me, and removing any ability for me to see between your noses.

Maybe it's my fault, snuggle bear. I think of author readings and interviews as fascinating, almost dry academic events. Not foreplay.

So, how was the event? Great. Neil Gaiman read two pieces, was interviewed by a fellow author, and answered a few audience questions passed forward on notecards. The whole night was a little over two hours.

However.

Dear other members of the audience:

Why are you talking while Gaiman is talking? Repeatedly? And when you're asked to be quiet by the guy sitting behind you, why do you give him dirty looks and sigh loudly? What story are you telling yourself where that's okay?

Why did you get up to use the bathroom two times each? And then climb over a row of people to leave early, fall on several young women, and then laugh at them? You hurt them, assface.

People. Why are you needing to repeatedly wave your camera phone in the air and block the view of everyone behind you just so you can have five seconds of the author saying something out of context? Why can't you just remember it?

Similarly, you're not paparazzi and you shouldn't aspire to be one anyway. They're dicks. The room is dark and there's no chance your photo will turn out from the back row, so why bother using flash? Flash won't fix the cavernous room and the distance from your subject. It will only blind everyone around you. And the end result will be a blurry pixelated image of a dude with lots of hair sitting in a big blob of white light and you'll say to your flickr feed, See? That's the night I saw Neil Gaiman. And your friends will be like, if you say so, man. Looks like two ghosts dueling.

Don't blame me. Blame the physics of light and optics.

Aaaaand scene.