The MTA Wants You to Believe That Showtime Is as Bad as Manspreading
Now that the MTA has solved the pernicious problem of manspreading on the subways, it’s decided to tackle other breaches of below ground-etiquette with a new round of shaming PSAs. The latest targets? Subway groomers, people with too many bags, and Showtime dancers.
Via New York‘s Daily Intel, we learned of the MTA’s new PSAs and tried to imagine a world in which we wouldn’t occasionally get hit by an errant just-clipped fingernail or make room for someone’s weekly shopping haul from Trader Joe’s. It was a nice place, that world we imagined. Really nice. But then we tried to imagine a world without the presence of Showtime dancers and… we actually got sort of depressed? We have to admit, there have been many times in our life when we’ve been annoyed by the announcement of “Showtime!” when all we wanted was a quiet ride where we could read a book and shut out the world around us. But insofar as etiquette offenses go, Showtime is nowhere near as egregious as people plucking their eyebrows or painting their nails. (It happens. Ugh.) It might be true that a subway isn’t the place for an acrobatic performance, but it’s just as true that there are fewer and fewer places in this city that are, and we can’t help but think that this is just one more step toward the ongoing sanitization of this city, which might be nice when it comes to, you know, fingernail clipping, but not so much when it comes to Showtime. Oh, well. At least the Showtime-lovers among us can rest easy knowing that these PSAs will almost certainly not work. There’s always that.
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