KVT – If I…

If only I was in charge of audience comings and goings at Nha Hat Lon! My essential dictates:

• Everyone entering the front gates will be frisked for mobile phones and burley men with sledge hammers will smash them (the phones) to smithereens.

• All children attempting to enter the concert hall (apart from identified child prodigies… but then aren’t they all soopa doopa prodigies these days?) will be put in special boxes in the foyer along with any parents who believe that their darlings are child prodigies who have to be talked to, fanned with programs, and smiled art when they have mini tantrums. All will be reluctantly released at the end of each performance without complimentary ice-cream or apology.

• All roving TV cameramen (they all seem to be male) will have their instruments jammed up suitable orifices as soon as they move from their allocated seats way up the back on level 3.

• Ditto for all other cameramen and especially those who want to capture the audience on film or video during performances.

• All cameramen who insist on having their unwieldy camera tripods set up for the whole performance in the middle of the aisles will be tied to them and pushed down the front steps by disgruntled patrons who have had their view of the stage completely blocked for the entire night.

• Any audience member who takes photos during performances will have the collected spit from trombones and other brass instruments poured over their heads at the end of the evening and related cameras will be flushed away permanently.

• No performer will be made to stand the indignity of being smothered in more than one bunch of flowers wrapped in scratchy crepe or tulle.

• Any audience member who succeeds in smuggling a mobile phone into the auditorium and who dares take or make calls or text or read text will be visited by the burley men in point 1 and will then have to eat the smithereens sprinkled over stale bun noodles soaked in shrimp sauce.

• Any audience member who carries on a prolonged conversation (more than 5 seconds) during a performance will be denied entry forever and ever until after amen.