To the People Sitting Next to Me at a Concert: Shut Up!

I went to my first concert in 1989. It was a New Kids on the Block "Merry Merry Christmas" show at the Great Western Forum and I was 12. I stood on my chair, I jumped around, I screamed, I danced and I sang, just like the thousands of other pre-teens and teens in the crowd did that night.

One thing I didn't do, though, was talk all night.

At last night's John Mayer show at the Hollywood Bowl, the couple in front of me talked to each other all night. They laughed, showed each other pictures on their phones, passed food and drinks down to their neighbors, did pretty much everything but watch the show they, and everyone else in our section, paid good money to do.

Though the couple in front of me was the most annoying, they weren't the only people in my section talking throughout the show. When not occasionally stopping to record songs with her phone, the girl next to me talked loudly to her friend about school, work, other friends, whatever. The topper, though, was when she moved down because the talkative couple and other neighbors were disrupting her filming. How dare they!

To that girl and her friend, to the couple in front of me, to the people behind me who also talked all night, I'd like to say one thing―Shut Up!

The first concert where I remember sitting next to loud, rude people was Tina Turner and Cyndi Lauper at the Arrowhead Pond in 1997. As Cyndi performed a stunning acoustic version of "True Colors," the group of friends next to me talked and talked. It was so irritating and distracting but, sadly, that's more and more the way people act at concerts.

I like dancing at shows, like singing along, like waving my arms and just going for it, but will rein it in because I don't want to annoy the people sitting around me. Maybe I shouldn't bother, maybe I should keep it up, stand the whole night even if every other person in my section is seated because if they won't shut up so I can hear the music why should I care if they're able to see the musician?

I know I'm slipping a bit into curmudgeon territory, lamenting the loss of civility and common courtesy in contemporary society, but I don't care. If people are behaving rudely, they need to be called out. If you want to have deep conversations with your friends, go to a restaurant, go to a bar, hang out at your house, talk on the phone or consider any of the other myriad options available that are less distracting and intrusive (both for your conversation and your neighbors) than going to a concert. You'll save a lot of money, too.

When I go to a concert, I go to hear my favorite songs played live, I go to sing along, I go to be part of a music-fanatic community, I go to turn to my friends and mouth, "Oh My God!" when a hidden gem or random cover is pulled out, but I don't go to listen to you. Please, take your conversation elsewhere because whatever you have to say isn't a tenth as interesting as whatever the night's performer has to say. Really, just shut up.

'Why Not?'

When I got my current iPod as a free replacement for the first-generation Mini I had, I decided to forgo the stress of putting music on it (How could I possibly select 500 songs from all the songs I own?) and instead dedicated this iPod to podcasts. I now subscribe to about a dozen, including "How Did This Get Made," "Pop Culture Happy Hour," "Sound Opinions" and "WTF," all of which I heartily recommend.

I also subscribe to SModcast, Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier's six-year-old podcast. The pair (with occasional fill-in co-hosts or guests) have recorded nearly 300 episodes and I'm a recent listener, so I've had some catching up to do and have been listening to the show a lot lately. A LOT. Like several a day. A lot.

Smith and Mosier met at film school more than 20 years ago and have since partnered on nearly a dozen films, with Smith the writer/director and Mosier the producer. SModcast was started as an excuse for the best friends to get together once a week and spend an hour or more having the conversations they had when they first met, sharing personal stories, dissecting the news and playing out ridiculous scenarios, mixed in with a healthy dose of dick and fart jokes, all of which is so much fun to listen in on.

A few weeks ago, Smith and Mosier discussed a news story about a man offering free room and board in exchange for the boarder dressing in a walrus suit into a "Human Centipede"-esque horror story, a story that Smith quickly turned into a screenplay, "Tusk," that begins filming soon. (Smith has written about the story of "Tusk" on his blog and for The Hollywood Reporter.)

I first wrote about the "Tusk" story in the summer and continue to eagerly follow its developments because, even though I'm not a horror movie fan, I'm inspired by what Smith and Mosier have done with this idea and with so many others. SModcast is a great example of that, as it's grown from one weekly podcast into an entire podcasting networking and online radio station with shows that tour internationally.

It's not simply tracking the progression of these ideas from inception into reality that's hitting me so hard at this point in my life, but that Smith and Mosier have been taking risks in doing these things, and are fully aware of the potential costs.

Earlier this week I listened to episode 154 "SMundance", released in February 2011, where Smith talked a bit about Sundance 2011 when he premiered his film "Red State" and announced he'd self-distribute the film, which led to a ridiculous amount of backlash. Mosier hadn't produced "Red State" because he was working on developing his own projects as a writer, director and producer, which he admitted in the episode was a big gamble.

"I've been trying to do my thing and, honestly … I just knew that if I kept doing it, I would keep doing it," he said. "I knew that I had to basically be like, 'All right, motherfuckers, swim,' I was like, I've got no choice. … I'll admit something personal, for the first time I many, many years in my life, I sit down every month and I'm figuring out how to pay my bills sometimes."

Nearly a year ago I was presented with the option of taking an assumed safe route or going out on my own, and chose the latter because I recognized how much of a trap being safe can be, because I know how easily time slips away, because I didn't want to be in suspended animation for the rest of my life and because sometimes you just have to jump. Overall, I've been secure in my decision, though every once in a while I hear a tiny doubting voice. Listing to Scott Mosier tell his own story about taking a really big chance quieted that voice and the only thing I heard after that wasn't "Why?" but "Why not?".

This fall, two-and-a-half years after "SMundance" was recorded, Mosier has been making the rounds to promote two of his projects, the acclaimed documentary "A Band Called Death", which he produced, and the upcoming animated film "Free Birds," on which he is a co-writer and co-producer. Even though my own gamble probably won't have such tangible results, it's great to see what could happen if you take a chance.