Miss Manners Vs. The Conductor’s Temper

In the last year alone, a conductor in Rio de Janeiro has mooned an audience which was booing the opera he was conducting, and another baton-twirler went on a 10-minute tirade against an audience in Florida for some perceived slight or other. The problem of audience behavior and musician backlash is nothing new in the music world, of course, but when conductors begin displaying their posteriors in public, someone needs to step in, and Judith Martin, better known as Miss Manners, figures it might as well be her. In fact, she’s proposing a career exchange with the marauding maestros. “It is true that Miss Manners can’t count terribly well, but she looks fetching in evening clothes and has some experience at terrorizing people into silence with a mere glance. How difficult can the rest of it be?”