down in front!!

I remember this one time when I was a kid and my father took me to the movies — a rare occasion when it was just him and me, as my mother was the movie lover, and I have two younger siblings — and just before the film started, a tall man sat down right in front of me. The theater was practically empty; I could count the number of other people there on one hand. So, with at least a hundred available seats, this dude plops down and blocks my view.

I grumble, and my father tries to get his attention, but no luck; the guy ain’t moving. So I start pretend coughing and hacking, and I kick the chair; finally, after a few minutes, the man gets up and finds another seat, far away from us, never acknowledging our presence.

Was that really so hard?

I’m short. I’m probably not a whole lot bigger now than I was that afternoon with my dad.

In general, I don’t really care that much about my height; I wouldn’t mind a few more inches, but I can live without them.

Except when I go out. To paraphrase Randy Newman, I think to myself, “Don’t want no tall people ’round here.”

Ever since that long-ago day, tall people sit or stand in front of me. All. The. Time. At plays. Concerts. Art talks. Movies. I go to a lot of cultural events — about two hundred and fifty a year — so I spend myriad nights looking at the back of people’s heads, obstructing my view. I know every possible shape of cranium, every hairstyle; I could be the opposite of August Sander, the German photographer who documented faces.   

I know what you’re thinking: Oh, that happens to me too. I hate that. But it doesn’t happen to you the way it happens to me, and not nearly as often.

In addition to being short, I’m also very nervous. On my way to a venue, I’m already anticipating the moment when a taller man or woman — and don’t get me started on people who wear their hair up; man buns and topknots are my enemy — will ruin my pristine view of the stage or screen. And, to make matters worse, they invariably breeze in after the event was scheduled to start. They’re not already seated when I arrive. They don’t come in ten minutes before curtain.

For a 7:00 show, they sit down at 7:06. For an 8:00 play, they arrive at 8:08. Last night it was 7:58, two minutes early.

You have no idea the tension I feel every time I’m at the theater, praying that either a short person or no one sits in front of me. And their arriving late only makes it that much worse, the promise of an unblocked evening, the hope of my immediate future, shattered right before my eyes, just as the lights go down.

(Perhaps that’s a significant part of the reason why I watched, and enjoyed, so many online presentations during the pandemic; there was never anyone sitting in front of me.)

At A Strange Loop, it was so bad that the two men two rows in front of me were affecting my line of sight.

At the Blue Hill Troupe’s production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Sorcerer a few weeks ago, the two men in front of me were like a pair of parallel smokestacks that I had to carefully maneuver between to see anything. (Fortunately, they did not come back after intermission, so it was clear sailing for the second act, a true rarity.)

At Coal Country at the Cherry Lane, I had to keep moving my head from side to side to swivel between the main action and troubadour Steve Earle; I was concerned about how that affected the person behind me, but I decided to assume that they were taller than me, and it’s a dog-eat-dog world anyway.

A few years ago, my wife, who towers over me, and I were at a show and two men, one significantly bigger than the other, sat down in front of us. We could have switched seats, which my wife and I regularly do, but we saw that this would affect the two people behind us. Instead we asked the gentlemen if they wouldn’t mind switching with each other, and they graciously did so. Moments later, one of them started sneezing; my wife asked if he wanted a tissue and he took one, saying, “Why not? We’re friends now.”

At a concert at Irving Plaza in the 2010s, a seatless venue that packs people in tight and is always a problem for me, I shouted out, “Really?!” when, after I had cleverly jockeyed for a good position to watch Bob Mould and his band, a seven-footer stopped right in front of me just as the trio was taking the stage; I was looking straight into nothing but back. He heard me, turned around, nodded, picked me up, and, with a hearty smile, put me down right in front of him. He even brushed away a few drunks who tried to get in front of me after that.

At the Irish Rep’s Two by Synge, in the company’s small, intimate downstairs space, an absolute giant, at least eight feet tall, sat down front and center, although in that case, he was blocking everyone’s view, as there are only five rows in the theater. (To make matters worse, it was open seating, so he could have plunked himself anywhere.)

When I was a teenager, my parents took me to see Frank Langella in Dracula at the Martin Beck Theatre. No surprise, I was having trouble seeing the stage. At intermission, my mother, who was five feet tall — my father was six feet — pointed out an empty seat in the first row on the right side and said I should grab it. So I did.

I spent the second act ducking expressive droplets from the master thespian, but I could see everything that was happening, every beautiful spurt of blood, every tantalizing eye movement. I gloried in the stageside spittle.

So the next time you go out, please have sympathy for the short person behind you. It might just be me.