It’s not like you aren’t warned or as if you haven’t already paid the price, as has everyone around you.

Before every show on Broadway — tickets for which sell for over a hundred bucks a pop — a disembodied voice asks that all cellphones, pagers, beepers and other electronic devices. And yet… well, as my mama used to say, there’s one in every crowd.

And so it was that in the middle of Monday’s nights performance of A Steady Rain, a cell phone went off. Repeatedly. And frankly, full credit must be given to stars Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig for not themselves going off on the responsible audience member.

It’s worth noting that the unidentified person who caught this moment on their own cell phone doesn’t exactly earn high marks either, seeing as video and audiotaping of all such performances is illegal.

I’ve long argued that cell phones have helped contribute to the downfall of civility in this country. Thanks to them, people can talk to whomever they want wherever they want as loudly as they want, and somehow, this is considered a good thing… even if it means the people around you have to listen to graphic details about your gynecologist appointment or, in this case, be disturbed in the middle of a performance they paid good money to see.

I’d love to ask the person whose phone was ringing (and the person who was illegally taping the performance) one question: What makes you so special? Because that is, of course, what it boils down to: The offending parties made the conscious decision that the rules — of which it would be almost impossible to be ignorant — weren’t meant for them.  Somehow, it’s okay for their ringing to interrupt the performance or the glow from their illegally-recording phone to blind those behind them or for, oh, right, them to be illegally taping the performance to begin with!

Each and every time new laws are passed, you can hear people complaining about how we are “living in a police state.” Maybe what we really need is to live in a teacher state… wherein as you walk into a place where cellphones, pages and beepers are not allowed, they are taken from you and can be reclaimed after the performance.

Of course, you know some fool to whom the rules somehow don’t apply will still manage to sneak theirs in, leave it on and disturb everyone around them. In which case I say we bring them up on stage for a publicly executed, videotaped, posted-on-the-web spanking.

Maybe that’ll teach ‘em. Then again, probably not.

Excuse me, I don’t mean to be rude or put too fine a point on it, but I feel I have to ask: What the HELL are you doing here?

That’s what I wanted to say to a handful of the people surrounding me during what should have been a lovely, relaxing evening last night.

Several hundred people were at the Highline Ballroom to hear the gorgeous song stylings of Katie Melua.

Four or five were there to ruin the experience for everyone else. To them, I say, at least on my own behalf, Mission: Accomplished.

As I sat there with three of my closest friends enjoying the concert, the drunk man standing behind me had a series of increasingly loud conversations. He was asked by me and several others to keep quiet. But of course, he didn’t listen, and things rapidly progressed to the point where another agitated member of my party was ready to take the guy out, physically and literally, and I sought a manager to have the guy kicked out, which he eventually was.

Then there was the loud, obnoxious, foreign fans.

Why is it that oftentimes, a performer’s biggest fans are the most obnoxious?

In this case, there were two sects. First, there were the photographers, including two young men who spent the entire show taking pictures and then showing them to one another and laughing, giggling, comparing notes loudly. Then there was the group of women who kept screaming out song unwanted song requests and phrases in Russian (which the singer speaks)… and then talking through each number she performed. Two of the women at several points got onto their cell phones to have loud conversations and, when asked if they might take the conversation outside the venue, glared as if they’d been asked to put the phones into their va jay-jay’s.

To all of these people I’d like to ask, again: What the hell were you doing there? Why did you feel the need to ruin the evening for people who’d not only bought tickets but then, in many cases — including that of my group — spent several hundred dollars on food and drink – in an attempt to have a pleasant, civilized evening on the town?

What gave YOU the right to ruin OUR evening?

And why, if you intended to spend the night talking or being rowdy, did you not go to a bar as opposed to a showroom where people had obviously and specifically gone to see the performer in question? This was not a rock concert or a piano bar, this was a quiet, simple performance… a woman, her guitar and her piano.

By the end of the evening, one of my companions was mad at me for making a big deal of the situation (although, in my defense, by the time I had the most offensive party removed from the venue, he’d begun flicking water at my head and calling me some rather nasty names) and it’s safe to say that the entire evening was ruined for my entire party.

And that leads me to these quetions:

Have we gotten to the point where one can no longer venture out into society without expecting to have to deal with rude people who don’t give a rat’s ass if they ruin the evening of those around them?

Are the 95 percent of us who want to sit through a movie without someone behind us taking a cell phone call or talking loudly simply expected to sit in (the shattered) silence rather than complain, if only for fear of being physically attacked?

In any case, next time a performer I want to see comes to town, rather than risk spending a small fortune only to have my evening ruined by the rude, crude and socially unacceptable folks of the world, I’ll stay home and listen to the performer’s CD’s.

I serve better drinks at my place anyway.

I went to see a play last night and the woman behind me kept texting. The sound of her fingernails clicking on the keys was really annoying. It really upset me when I realized the person she was texting was sitting two seats away from her! What is wrong with people?

To the incredibly loud guy sitting in starbucks right now who is laughing like a hyenna, burping, having a wildly loud phone conversation and just generally disturbing everyone around him: Thanks for that. Guess given the price of coffee here, we should be grateful for the show!