Personal space

It's been years since Marc and I volunteered to pay for the opportunity to suffer at the Stadium of Fire.
Not that the fireworks aren't always spectacular and that the entertainment isn't generally rewarding but there's the horrendous traffic to consider and the ash in your hair.
This year, Marc really wanted to see and hear the Beach Boys. He knows all their songs and their history and I heard for weeks all about how Brian Wilson would be making the tour after years of seclusion.
AND we had these nifty little stadium chairs from R.C.Willey that would make sitting on bleachers a  less torturous.
We headed over to Provo about 7-ish and parked on the side of the road many, many blocks from the stadium. (We could see it from where we parked but just barely.)

What's not to like?

We hiked in and found our seats and plunked down our chairs. The people behind us sort of gasped because the backs of our chairs leaned into their leg space like airline chairs in full recline.
We sat down and the lady next to me sort of sighed.
The arm rest on my chair was already cutting into her hip.
Marc's chair took over a little more of seat 6 than it should.
We had seats 7 and 8 but the seat space was designed for the skinny butts of starving college kids more than for -- uh -- slightly heavy baby boomers.
We might have been all right but everyone around us was fairly good-size as well so it made for a crowded row (and a crammed tight stadium).
We tried to pull in but the chairs are pretty rigid in design and they don't slide together to save space.
We decided to try and ignore the unhappiness around us.
When Marc went to get brownies, the guy on the other side of his chair looked at me disdainfully and said "Those take a little more than the allotted space, don't they?" I told him that "my husband felt bad about it." I couldn't think of anything more to do or say. If we closed up the chairs, we still would have had to find space to store them and there wasn't any.
I know the lady next to me suffered but her husband was taking a fair-sized chunk of space on the other side of her so he could have moved over a bit.
Instead she kept whispering to him and kind of rubbing her thigh.
I tried to just ignore it but it's amazing how much you can hear when people are thinking unkind thoughts.
I tried to ignore the people behind me kicking the backs as well.
If the stadium didn't try to squish too many people into the space, it would help AND if R.C. Willey would have checked to see if their chairs met stadium seat standards, that would've helped.
In any event, we just sort of hunkered down and weathered through.
At least, our designated space was guaranteed.