Eavesdropping – updated 2017
Here is a little story about eavesdropping and the consequences it engendered.
My daughter loves to evaluate events she has been in, for example a choir show or cheerleading competition in high school. Afterwards we would sit around, maybe at a restaurant, and go over each and every routine we saw, telling her what we thought of them, good and bad. It’s a way for her to figure out her place in the world, to be reassured that she, and the group, did ok, maybe even great. She likes evaluating and critiquing, it helps her make sense of what she went through.
We were doing just that this past weekend after her performance in her College’s annual big singing and dancing extravaganza. Eighteen groups performed over 4 hours. Eight of them were to be chosen to move on and perform next fall at another big event. It is a very intense competition.
We were at Denny’s around midnight going over each group’s performance, giving our opinions of everything from the sets to the dancing, music choices, solo performers, etc. We were laughing about some of them, saying how impressed we were with others. Some were good, some great, some terrible, and we were saying so. We all had different opinions. I liked some that the others thought were terrible. It was interesting comparing notes.
While we were in the middle of this discussion a woman from the table next to us got up and came over to us. She looked angry and said in a pretty huffy manner, ‘Could you please stop talking about these performances. I have friends in that show and you are personally attacking them. I am very offended and I would like you to stop.’ She then went back to her table and sat down. She stared at us. I was facing her and stared back. She had a friend facing away from us who never talked or showed her face.
My ire was up a bit and I responded by saying ‘We will say whatever we want, wherever we want’. She responded ‘You are offensive to me, what you said was a personal attack on a friend of mine.’ Our daughter’s friend had her head on the table by then, our daughter was looking uncomfortable and my wife I knew was wondering where I was headed. I told the woman, ‘what we were doing was not a personal attack, but an honest critique of a performance, our comments were restricted to how they did on stage and we said nothing about them personally.’
She then said ‘You know, we are Christian in this place and you shouldn’t talk like that. You should just say ‘I liked this, I didn’t like that’ and move on.’ Anyone who knows me knows that if someone plays the ‘Christian’ card without knowing what they are talking about (in my opinion obviously) is going to get a response from me. I said ‘Being Christian does not mean you are not allowed to critique and evaluate performances’. It went on for a few more minutes and then we let it go. We continued our critique, albeit in lower voices.
The rest of the evening was taken up with discussing this woman’s comments, her intrusion into our conversation, her eavesdropping in the first place. We were in turn defensive, offended, understanding, compassionate, angry, self-righteous and in hysterics over it.
After we got home, my wife and I discussed our feelings about it. While she was proud of my measured response we also both felt that we perhaps could have said things differently to the woman. Her belligerence at the beginning led the way to my response but we wondered if I couldn’t have gone in a different direction with it.
We could have been more sympathetic to the possibility that the other woman in the booth had been in the show and was really hurt by our comments. We could have been less confrontational back to the woman. In the end I don’t feel bad about my response but I do want to always be able to evaluate honestly who I am and what I do, for my sake, for the sake of the people I interact with and for the sake of my daughters and the example I set for them.
What ideas do you have for how I could have responded, or how you would have?
Drawing and commentary by Marty Coleman
“There’s nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.” – Thornton Wilder, 1897-1975, American playwright
