Faced with rude behavior, he threw out the first pitch

CODA

GREG BEAN

So there you are at the geezer matinee at the theater because you don’t want to fight the crowds, and hope that the few people who show up for the early show will be quiet enough to let you enjoy the expensive film without yakking all the way through it. But wouldn’t you know it, one of the six people in the theater sits right in front of you and immediately fires up his cell phone to check his text messages, and keeps the phone on right through the public service announcement, which asks him to be polite and turn it off, and well into the movie.

At a crucial chase scene, you’ve finally had enough. The light from the thing is distracting, the beeping is driving you crazy, and you can feel the veins pumping in your neck. Your bad angel is encouraging violence. In your head, scenes from your favorite movie, “Lonesome Dove,” are playing — the one in which Woodrow Call (Tommy Lee Jones) nearly beats a man to death for hitting his son and later explains, “I hate rude behavior in a man. I won’t tolerate it,” and the one in which Gus McCrae (Robert Duvall) slams a bartender’s head into the boards for slow service, explaining, “It ain’t much of a crime to whack a surly bartender.”

You hold the bad angel at bay. The guy ruining your movie is not a heart surgeon talking a colleague through a delicate transplant operation. You can see on his screen that he’s discussing what he’d like to eat for dinner. Why did this moron pay so much for a ticket to a movie he was going to ignore? You tap him on the shoulder. “Can you please turn that off?” you ask, forcing a politeness into your voice that you certainly don’t feel. He doesn’t acknowledge you. “What’s your problem?” he asks, before going back to the text message he’s madly typing.

Now what do you do? Whap him over the head with your walking stick? Turn stool pigeon? Leave the movie at the crucial moment to find someone in theater management? Sit back and fume? Move to a different seat? Start singing “The Star- Spangled Banner” at the top of your lungs?

Theater critic Kevin Williamson and his reaction in the same situation elevated him to the Top 10 in my pantheon of personal heroes. I’ll let him tell what happened at a recent performance of “Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812,” a musical based on “War and Peace”:

“The woman seated next to me was on her phone through most of the show. When she was not on her phone, she and her friends were engaged in a four-part imitation of ‘Sex and the City’ brunch conversation. I asked her nicely — more than once — but she did not respond with courtesy. She said: ‘Just don’t look.’ So I took her phone and tossed it.

“There was a moment of wonderful, shocked silence. She salvaged as much self-respect as she could — which is to say, she slapped me — and then stalked off in search of her phone. A few minutes later, I was visited by an annoyed gentleman in a black suit and soon enough found myself out on the street. Yes, it was worth it.”

Williamson said he knows his action was probably a crime, but he considers it more an act of criticism. “Occasionally, a shocking gesture is called for, perhaps even a histrionic one,” he wrote. “I may have met conventional-grade rudeness with thermonuclear counterforce, but I did it in the interests of preserving civility, violating standards to preserve them. And if the law, in its majesty, should decide that I need to spend a night in jail over this episode, then I will be happy to do so.”

I shared this story with my good friend, Al, whose only response was “Where can I send a check to help with the bail?” I don’t know, but you might need to send it to me, the next time I go to a geezer matinee at the multiplex.

Don’t know if you caught it, but New Jersey state Sen. Richard Codey and New York City Council Speaker and mayoral candidate Christine Quinn held a joint news conference last Friday, during which they called for raising the minimum age for purchasing tobacco products to 21. If New Jersey — where the minimum age is now 19 — raised its minimum to 21, it would be the first state in the nation to do so. I’m certainly not pro-tobacco. I lost both of my parents to lung cancer and hate the stuff. I probably tried, and failed, 50 times before I was able to quit smoking two decades ago. I know how pernicious the addiction is. I also know Codey, who thinks this legislation might prevent some young adults from starting at a younger age, is doing this with the best of intentions.

But there’s a real hypocrisy in our society in the way we treat — and attempt to regulate — the behavior of young adults and some of the questionable choices they make. I’m speaking, of course, of the fact that young men and women only need to be 18 before they can join the military without parental consent. Under the proposed legislation, they could find themselves fighting on the front lines of our nation’s wars three years before they could purchase a legal smoke or a beer in Jersey. Too immature to buy cigarettes? Mature enough to hold a gun? To serve our nation in harm’s way?

I won’t pretend to have the answers to this thorny question, and am still working it out for myself — but it would be nice to achieve some consistency in our thinking.

I’m going to take a short leave of absence from writing this column to deal with some pesky health issues. Look for me back on these pages in late June.

You can reach Gregory Bean at [email protected].