My husband and I were on a really nice streak of going to concerts. From little clubs where local musicians sing in gravely voices, wear flannel shirts and play dulcimers, to big concert venues with pyrotechnics and $10 beers, and lots in between. One blues band we saw played car mufflers that their dad had turned into a guitar and a base. I was enjoying it all. Until I was told by Chrissie Hynde that I'm doing it all wrong and I'm not living in the moment.
The Pretenders' Chrissie Hynde is making a name for herself as the aging rocker who wants everyone to live in the moment. If I were her agent, I would have gone with The 63-year-old who can still fit into leather pants, but that's me. At her concerts, there's an announcement made every five minutes before the start suggesting that we all live in the moment. "Chrissie Hynde respectfully requests that you refrain from using camera phones during the show tonight. Please enjoy the concert and be in the moment, not behind a screen."
The respectfully part ended when Chrissie started to perform. Because she's not very nice. In the middle of her first song she stopped mid-lyric and yelled "Put the phone down!" to a middle-aged lady in the fifth row, who had apparently not heard the 18 announcements and was refusing to live in the moment. We were aghast.
We got the message. She may as well have grabbed that lady's pink cell phone, snapped it in half and crucified it on her mic stand. For the rest of the concert, we were as well behaved as trained circus animals. I didn't take my phone out until I was home, undressed and in bed. And even then I checked for phone messages with as much guilt as if I had embezzled money from my church.
I read reviews of Chrissie's concert tour in other cities and they almost all mention the weirdness of her yelling at audience picture-takers. "It's far more distracting to hear a vocalist yell "PUT DOWN YOUR PHONE" in the middle of a song than it is to see glowing screens throughout the crowd," one reviewer said. In Nashville, no one obeyed, so she walked off the stage. The audience was confused and proceeded to take pictures of each other.
I get the live-in-the-moment thing. Although I think Chrissie Hynde's thing is more that she doesn't want anyone taking photos of her on stage and she doesn't want to seem like a douche. And if she's hiding behind Live in the Moment, she will burn for that. Because the live-in-the-moment crowd doesn't tolerate divas.
This is a movement that has produced lots of memes that feature flowers, mild weather, rainbows, puppies and toddlers in cute outfits. They're pretty convincing.
I'm sure there are some moments that are worth putting down my phone and not checking email, not checking Google maps to see how the heck I ended up at the dentist when I am supposed to be getting a mammogram, and not texting my daughter a picture of a guy across from me on the bus who looks just like Ray Liotta. And some of those moments might involve the aforementioned flowers and puppies. But some don't. Some moments star a smelly drug addict across from me on the bus whose zipper is down.
Sometimes there are moments when the best thing to do, the most flowery rainbowy thing you can do is to look away, pick up your phone and play that Q on Words with Friends.
Some moments are nothing to write home about. So we may as well pick up our phones and write home about something else.
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Read more of Diane's Just Humor Me columns here. Sign up for our weekly e-newsletter to get new blog post notifications. And if you like her blog, you'll love her book, Home Sweet Homes: How Bundt Cakes, Bubble Wrap, and My Accent Helped Me Survive Nine Moves.
