ON THE TOWN:Music to nobody’s ears

The planets have lined up again. No, not to create our recent heat wave, but to follow-up on a recent topic in this space.

My latest hero in the uphill battle to clean up our act, both the verbal one and the trash-on-the-ground one, is a guy who was sitting in the end seat of section 2, row G, at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre performance last Saturday night.

My wife, kids and I were there to enjoy the “Mozart Birthday Bash” performance by the Pacific Symphony Orchestra. Let me qualify that by pointing out that my wife and I probably enjoyed it a lot more than our kids.

Halfway through one of the selections in the second half of the concert, something astonishing happened, something I had never before seen and thanks to the man in row G will never see again.

While the orchestra was playing, a vendor walked up the aisle trying to sell bags of popcorn. The vendor did so silently, but it was highly inappropriate.

I was sitting in the aisle seat of row R. As she passed row G, the guy on the end waved her over and told her in no uncertain terms to stop selling popcorn. I could tell all of this by body language.

As she walked up the aisle, she made a final, half-hearted attempt to sell popcorn. By the time she got to row R, she was done, not having sold one bag and enduring lots of dirty looks.

After the show, I walked down to the man in row G and said: “Thank you for saying something to the popcorn vendor. I’m usually the one who does that.”

He smiled and said: “I’m going to say something to the management, too.”

And he will. And I doubt that I will ever again see anyone trying to sell something from the aisles of the amphitheater during a classical music performance.

But wait, there’s more!

Yesterday, I had a rare opportunity to listen to Dennis Prager’s radio program. It is on the air Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to noon. If you listen to only one program each day, make it Prager’s.

If the United States were ever to appoint a spokesperson (appoint is the key word), I would nominate Prager.

On yesterday’s show, he opened up a discussion about the pollution caused by the public use of profanity, a topic just discussed here, except Prager made the case that it is much more harmful to society than even I thought.

Prager said that at a baseball game, for example, people may say something to the person who lights up a cigarette, but not to the person who swears. “Nobody will say anything,” he said. I’m proud to say he’s wrong about that. But he is very right on his larger point.

What we say can be harmful even if we do not use profanity. Sometimes speech is harmful even for what we don’t say.

The case in point is how we are going to handle illegal immigrants under a new law-and-order regime. We are now being told that a typical raid on a business suspected of employing illegals is not a raid but a “sweep,” the connotation being that we’re cleaning something.

These are raids, folks, and those who support them should have the courage to call them what they are and not try to dress them up.

At a recent meeting, Costa Mesa Mayor Allan Mansoor also stated that raids (he called them “sweeps”) would not be the “focus” of the city’s immigration policy. Translation: We’re not ruling them out. Just because they’re not the focus doesn’t mean we won’t conduct them.

Don’t be misled by the political doublespeak. Lurking in the shadows is a very scary scenario of raids and other forms of “enforcement” that will remind you of a very black time in the world’s history.

I will believe that until I hear otherwise, clearly and directly.

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Once again, great theater is found in places other than the complex in Costa Mesa. This Thursday through Sunday, the Orange County High School of the Arts is performing both Romeo and Juliet and “West Side Story” at Symphony Hall in Santa Ana.

There are matinees and evening performances of both and there are no bad seats in the venue.

Tickets are very reasonable and can be ordered online at www.ocsarts.net. Then look for “tickets.”

Disclosure: This is a shameless plug for my daughter, Bean, who is in one of the performances.

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Out of town subject: Even if you are a die-hard, seriously twisted anti-Semite, you should be supporting Israel in the current Middle East conflict. Israel is trying to destroy two very evil organizations that want not only Israel’s destruction, but yours, too.

Israel is fighting the war we should have fought instead of the one we are engaged in in Iraq.