The Big (Standing) O

Like many forms of recognition – from school achievement awards to U.S. presidential elections – the standing ovation has been significantly de-valued over the past decade.

Once reserved for truly breathtaking performances or the introduction of a recently handicapped legend, the standing ovation is now routinely awarded by gullible audiences everywhere to all manner of public display. The result isn’t important any more as long as the performers try really hard and mean well.

I smacked into this cold truth one Saturday night in college. The theatre department was putting on a light romantic comedy called something like 5,000 Years of Bastard Male Oppression: The Destruction of the Female Soul. Still laboring under the belief that college girls were really looking for a sensitive, open-minded guy, I agreed to take a girl I’d been seeing casually to the performance, hoping it would cement an improvement in the terms of our informal social contract.

Settling in among the roomful of short-haired women in flannel (and one man) I realized my plan may had been ill conceived.

Lest you think I’m anti-women – flannel clad or otherwise – let me pause here to say that I readily acknowledge the ongoing difficulty of the female experience and more than supported these performers’ right to express that struggle through art, no matter how awful that expression ended up being.

The play actually started out fine. Some men-aimed satire and mildly witty commentary. I could appreciate that. And had it followed its initial course, I could have enjoyed and appreciated the new perspective it shared. Unfortunately, the actors put on their pretentiousness hats and sharply turned to delivering a Message of Righteous Indignation that their abilities weren’t up to conveying effectively or even entertainingly.

As I recall, at that point the rudimentary plot was given ballast by a few interpretive dance numbers, punctuated by random screaming and other varied outbursts. At one point a cat was brought on stage, then quickly ushered off. The messy affair ended with a 20 minute (!) video montage of hardcore pornography, set to the kind of light instrumental music you’d typically hear in a tire store waiting room.

After the cheery montage ended, I gathered my things, expecting to get out after some polite applause (which I was happy to give, because the effort, no matter how misapplied, was worth some recognition). I turned to my date. She was sobbing. Then I looked around the room. More sobbing. Everywhere. My lone Y-chromosomal compatriot was sobbing so hard two of the sobbing flannel women were consoling him.

Then the real trouble began. The group sob subsided and the applause built. Growing by the second. One person stood up. Then another. Then another. Until the entire audience was on its feet, except for me and an elderly woman across the aisle who, though wheelchair bound, seemed to be trying.

My date urged me to stand too. When it was clear I wouldn’t be pressured into a hollow display, she distanced herself from me like one would drop a stick she was holding upon discovering it was radioactive.

Like most people of principle in this world today, I stood, or rather, sat alone. The standing ovation rolled across the room but I sat motionless. Ducking the hissing, the jeers and the occasional wadded program.

Needless to say, the relationship I was stoking by attending the play in the first place ended before the lights came up. My date left with one of the sobbing, flannel clad women who, I believe, she lives with to this day.

I left secure in the knowledge that, while I may had set male/female understanding back a generation or two (and certainly wouldn’t be touching anyone’s breasts that night), I had stricken a mighty blow for my lonely cause. I also left secure in the knowledge that I would never attend one of the college’s horrible plays again – considering the department’s director would officially ban me from doing so in a letter I’d receive the next week.