#1179 Bottled Up

So here's the deal. The other night I was watching a musician do a show. He was like most good performers, in that he really threw himself into his work. That passion that propels a front man to stage-dive is only barely suppressed in even the mellowest performer.
You can bet there’s a roiling cauldron of emotion boiling even inside Mel Torme.
In any event, this performer occasionally went back to the amplifier area to have a drink of water. After about the fourth repetition of this behavior, I noticed something odd.
He was drinking his water out of one of those ubiquitous plastic bottles that are polluting and destroying the planet. Particularly ironic as this singer is known for his environmental and political activism.
But what I noticed was, the bottle had a screw-on cap. And instead of leaving the bottle open after he finished his drink, the musician screwed the cap back on tight again.
And I thought, I do that too. And I also thought, so does everyone else I know. Even if we fully intend to drink the whole bottle at one sitting, we almost always screw and unscrew the cap after every sip.
It’s become a national obsession.
Now I can understand the musician worried about a bottle of water spilling on his amplifier. But does he have to go through the elaborate screwing ritual between every two songs? Can he leave off the cap even once? Can I?
And here’s an interesting thought. Could he save the planet a little bit and use water in, um, a cup? Knowing full well he’s going to go through an entire performance, how about a thermos style carafe? It would keep his water cold, he could pour it into a cup, and save himself a lot of screwing.
Or if it’s the screwing he craves, he could get one of those insulated travel cups and mess with the lid on that.
Just a thought, but if we all used a few more cups and a few fewer water bottles, we’d do a lot less obsessive screwing around.
And a lot less screwing up of the planet while we’re at it.
America, ya gotta love it.