Fuming

I am royally pissed off. I mean really angry - so angry I want to weep. Why, oh why, oh WHY must people wear perfume?!? TC got us tickets to a concert today, a piano duet by two of the best duetists in the world, held at the Royal Conservatory. I was excited about it, and really looked forward to an enjoyable afternoon. Things were going well - we arrived a little early, found good seats, and settled in. Then just before the concert was set to start, a woman covered in furs and fumes arrived. Her scent assaulted my nose before she even entered the row behind us for one of the few remaining seats, which happened to be right behind me.

I immediately went on the alert. Her perfume was so strong that it was actually hurting me to breathe, but I hoped beyond hope that I'd be able to make it through the performance before the full-blown allergy attack that I knew would be coming actually hit. I fanned. I breathed as shallowly as possible. I tried to discretely cover my nose when I needed to take a deeper breath. I was so focused on trying to breathe that I honestly couldn't tell you much about what the music was like.

Then I felt my right eye start to water, and I knew there was nothing I could do. At the beginning of the second piece, I started feeling the need to cough, which is how I react to perfume. Have you ever tried to keep yourself from coughing? For 30-40 minutes? It isn't pretty. Your nose runs. Your eyes stream. And depending on how desperate you are to control your cough (and I was desperate), you end up doing the coughing equivalent of a dry heave. Not that any of this actually prevented me from coughing. All it did was allow me to try and time my coughs with a louder part of the piece rather than during the silences between movements.

By the time intermission came, I felt so badly for the people sitting around me - I know how disruptive it can be to have someone coughing in your ear while you're trying to enjoy music - that I left and came home. There was no way I was going to be able to stay. Even if we sat somewhere else, the damage had already been done, and my allergies were in full swing. Before I left, though, I really wanted to find the woman and tell her what she'd done - ruining the entire concert for me, and at least partly for the people who were forced to sit and listen to me have a coughing fit. It was probably a good thing I didn't see her.

It just makes me so mad! I've heard every excuse under the sun for wearing perfume, but ultimately there is no good reason for it. If you wear perfume it's because you like to. You don't need it. It doesn't make you a better, more likeable person. It says nothing about you - nothing good, anyway. All it does is make a significant part of the population miserable whenever they go out in public because they can't breathe!!!!

So lay off the perfume!