If You Can't Beat 'Em...
Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 01:37AM 
There's one in every crowd. Even on Broadway, despite the very clear instruction for audience members to turn off their cell phones before a performance begins, there's always one bad apple (or four) who was apparently so deep into his Playbill that he didn't heed the request. You know the rest of the story. Midway through Act One, a tinny rendition of "Viva La Vida" or "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," blares from the depths of a coat pocket or purse. By the time the owner finds the little noisemaker, the damage has been done. The audience is thinking about the phone and not the action on stage.
So maybe the time had come for the Great White Way to make cell phones part of the act. At Neil LaBute's Reasons to be Pretty, which has just opened at the Lyceum theater (above) on Broadway, patrons are asked to turn their cell phones on before the show. Text the word "pretty" to 42903, a voice from the rafters announces. Faster than you can say alphanumeric, the audience lights up with BlackBerries and iPhones, their owners furiously texting in anticipation of what message might lie in wait for them. As these happy texters begin a digital dialogue about pulchritude (the theme of the show), the ushers stand in wait. And then, right before the curtain rises, they work the aisles, making sure each glowing phone has been stowed and silenced. Amazingly, the ploy works. During the performance I attended, not a single ring was heard after the lights were darkened.
Maybe the time has come for other institutions to adopt this practice. Just imagine: our synagogues, churches and symphony halls could once again be free of poor man's Coldplay and Cyndi Lauper. Now that's a Reason to be Happy as well as Pretty.
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With all eyes upon him, this week Barack Obama faced a dilemma we've all encountered at one time or another.....someone next to you makes a verbal slip-up. Do you jump in to correct the mistake or do you ignore it and move on?
Say, for instance, your not-so-fashion-savvy neighbor pronounces Versace with a long "a" and a soft "c," (rhyming it with "lace") Do you say nothing and let Gianni roll over in his grave, or do you unleash a correction that would make Donatella proud?
The nicest way to handle this sort of scenario is to educate your neighbor without appearing to have done so. A subtle correction can easily be accomplished by repeating the word or name properly later in the conversation. This is a particularly thoughtful method when the malaprop has been made in front of other people and there is potential that the person who misspoke will feel embarrassed.
But what do you do when the precision of your words has potential legal consequences and you're uttering those words in front of a television audience of nearly 40 million? Here's what I'd counsel: You ignore "repeat after me" and take the oath as you know it has been written. As it happened, Obama apparently second-guessed his own instinct that Chief Justice John Roberts had erred, and after hesitating, the president-elect ultimately repeated the words in the same incorrect sequence as Roberts