When did audience members start taking their shoes off?

Call me a hick, but I often do this at the cinema.

Same thing for me at Anything Goes!
I mean... it wouldn't bother me unless they smelled.... but it's kind of just weird.

The same time they started texting, answering their phones, coming in way after the show started, eating snacks and having drinks, filming the performance, yelling like cheerleaders at a sporting event and altogether not respecting the PEOPLE WHO ARE PERFORMING RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM.

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I remember seeing a short film about when you take your shoes off in the theatre you should keep them in front of you. At the end of the short one woman left the theatre wearing two different shoes because the woman behind her kicked her's off instead of sliding them off and keeping them in front of her. I'll have to see if it's on youtube because I cannot remember where I saw it.

This short was in black and white and was made in the 40's. This is not a new phenomenon.

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I took my shoe off once during a show. I had an badly sprained ankle and couldn't stand having my shoe on anymore.

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Years ago, I saw a woman do the same thing at The Elephant Man. Took her shoes off and propped her feet up against the wall of the stage, so far up that her toes were wiggling over the edge. I noticed Billy Crudup and the other actors glancing over occasionally. She was clueless.

? Since SEX AND THE CITY mandated totally uncomfortable and inappropriate shoes must be worn in NYC at all times?

I think they started taking off their shoes about the same time they started making sandwiches. When I saw LOOPED, the woman next to me (on the aisle) took off her shoes, took out a shopping bag, pulled out lunch meat, bread, condiments, and proceeded to make herself a sandwich and eat it during the first act. She washed it down with whatever was in her thermos.

At intermission she pulled out crackers and slices of cheese that she folded into fours and made cheese and crackers for the second act.

I was dumbstruck.

Where do these f@#king people come from? Seriously?

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They act like they are in their g@#d@#n living room watching "Murder She Wrote."

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Let's not forget, the idea of the theatre as a place of class and sophistication, and the quiet, decorous and receptive audience, is only about a hundred and twenty years old, dating back mainly to Richard Wagner's rules for the theatre. In the long run, polite audiences are historically the exception, not the rule.

Well, remembering that a lady next to me started clipping her nails during The People in the Picture, I guess people clipping their toenails is going to be the next step.

Really, if someone slips off their shoes and keeps their feet under their chairs, it's no big deal, but sticking feet onstage -- or, like some people I saw during Jerusalem, putting your feet on the empty chairs in the row in front of you -- is just trashy.

The theatre, alas, is a microcosm of the world in which we live, not some gated Utopia. So, to quote a song title from Maggie Flynn, look around your little world..... if you dare.


And then ask yourself, why do people eat smelly foods on a crowded subway? Why do people conversing in public places use language that would make a sailor blush? And why in schools across the nation do students talk to themselves during the lesson, text, read their e-mail, eat, etc? And why when one goes to a movie does one find sticky soda, gum, popcorn, and assorted refuse all over the floor? And why do people go the theatre dressed as if they were going to the gym? And why do plays that are vile in word and spirit get produced, and receive rave reviews and Tony nominations? And why, and why, and why.

Because that's the world we live in, that's why.