Please silence your cell phones

Tonight I joined the rest of America in this year's official Memorial Day Weekend activity: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. As with any summer blockbuster on opening weekend, the theatre filled up pretty quickly. Which always begs the ever-important, movie-experience question: What kind of people will be sitting around you. Because if you're one of the unlucky ones, you have a show killer near you. That's right -- a show killer. One who kills the movie-going experience. For years, there's been the same old culprits. The crying baby. The person who refuses to turn his cell phone off. The chatty friends. The middle school gang of friends. The big-haired old lady who refuses to sit anywhere but directly in front of you. The person who thinks they're the official movie narrator. You get the idea. And we've all experienced them.

But tonight, I realized that the changing technologies has brought a new threat into the theatres: Text-messaging high school girl. This silent threat might be considerate enough to silence the cell phone. But that just means you won't get any warning each time they flip open their phones lighting up a 4-foot radius in the theatre with their 2-inch LCD screen. Luckily, kids these days can type 85 WPM on a numeric keypad, so their phones only have to be open for about 6 seconds to type a response roughly the length of this blog post.

I swear, though, this girl next to me tonight almost sent me in to an epileptic seizure from all the flashing LCD screens. It was like a strobe light. And if the cell phone girl happens to be sitting next to her friend, then you've probably got chatty friends to deal with now because they both have to have a giggle about whatever 12-letter acronym sentence thy just typed to their friend working at Abercrombie and Fitch. I just hope, for their sake, that they have unlimited text messaging on their cell phone plan. Otherwise, that $7.50 movie just became an even more expensive chat room.