I met a friend at Symphony Hall yesterday for a Beethoven thing. The first half was a kind of lecture by Harvard musicologist Thomas Forrest Kelly, and then after intermission the Handel and Haydn Society played Symphony No.5 in C Minor, Op.67. It was nice, but, you know, everyone’s heard this one so many times that even though Professor Kelly urged us to imagine this was the first time, it was impossible.

Whenever I hear that bum-bum-bum-BUUUUUMMM, I’m expecting that disco beat to kick in. I mean, I grew up with the disco version of Beethoven’s 5th. And “Rock Me Amadeus.” And the like. And my dad, bless him, loved those “Hooked on Classics” cassettes. That’s what we listened to on road-trips. He never got tired of ‘em. If you’re not familiar with the “Hooked on” phenom: “cross Ludwig van Beethoven with the Bee Gees, and what do you get?” That’s the idea. I mean, you’ve got these classical medleys, with all the compositions kind of hooked together by a disco beat. The individual medleys usually had a theme to them, like “Hooked on Romance” or “Hooked on Can-can.” And with these cassettes my dad utterly obliterated any enjoyment I could ever possibly hope to get from “light” classical music in adulthood. I was scarred.

But. Like I said, Symphony Hall yesterday was nice. Conductor Grant Llewellyn is a cutie.

For some reason I took the orange line from Downtown Crossing to Mass Ave, and walked to Symphony Hall, rather than take the green line from Park. I think it’s a kind of atavism. I mean, when I lived in JP my whole life was on the orange line. I never took the green line. Of course, the Mass Ave station is not far from Symphony, so it was no big deal.

On the train this little Latina came on with her girlfriend, and sat across from me, but on the seatback/window ledge, with her feet on the seat. That’s the trendy way to sit, on the orange line T at least. I mean, on the platforms, all the kids sit on the bench-backs with their dirty, muddy shoes on the benches themselves. But it’s logistically harder to do on the trains, because you have to be under a window, since the seatbacks aren’t wide enough. The window ledge gives you an extra four or five inches. But still, it looks precarious, and less comfortable than just sitting on the seat itself, which is what it’s for. So you have to wonder what’s behind it.

What’s happened with the bench situation is, after you see a bunch of people doing it, you’re like, well, I’m not gonna sit on the bench the normal way and get my trousers all dirty from the crud on their shoes. So you either don’t sit on the benches at all, or you sit on the bench-back like they do. When in Rome.

The young woman seemed to almost be daring someone to tell her to sit her ass down like the rest of us, but you don’t mess with these Latinas on the orange line. They will rip you limb from limb. So she sort of surveyed the scene from her elevated perch and knew she was the queen of that car. “Cowards!” she was thinking. “Worms!”

And she’s right. That’s the thing about modern life. So many socially unacceptable behaviors could be nipped in the bud by a good ear-boxing. Just once is all it takes. I mean, you do something socially unacceptable, get a good clip round the ear from a total stranger, you’re just not gonna do it again. But, alas, those days are gone.

After the Symphony we went for dinner and drinks. We had Thai for dinner, at a place right around the corner from Symphony Hall. I wasn’t impressed. We left there and ended up at a place called Match on Mass Ave. It’s an atmospheric restaurant/bar that advertises itself as THE place for mini-burgers and martinis. Très, très Middlebrow.

So, as you might expect, it looks like a classy joint, but in the end it turns out not to be. I guess that’s their gimmick, their shtick. Boston is, essentially, a college town, and almost everywhere you go to get a drink turns out to be a glorified sports bar. But it just wasn’t working at Match. I mean, it was like Jennel, the other night: here’s this striking, gorgeous girl, and she opens her gorgeous mouth and has a voice like a fishwife.

That’s the thing about Match: designwise it’s Pearl Bar, but patronwise, it’s Cheesecake Factory. The anorexic hostess exuded attitude, appropriately enough, but it soon became obvious she was compensating for something the place lacked. For me the tip-off was the funky curved-stem martini glasses.

Rule No.1: Martini glasses should not be fucked with. The classic martini glass is one of those rare, perfect things that cannot be improved on, and should remain sacrosanct. Here you have this place that puts a premium on design, but the devil’s in the details, and if you flub the details, you can spend all the money in the world on ambiance and still end up with a Cheesecake Factory on your hands.

Then there’s the martinis themselves. The martini is another rare, perfect thing (”the only American invention as perfect as a sonnet,” as H.L. Mencken had it). It has a history. It should be hallowed. There are only a few variations on the theme that should be allowed, like dry or very dry. This vulgar proliferation of so-called martinis—these froo-froo concoctions that are only martinis, in a perverse reversal of Mencken’s diktat, because they’re in a martini glass–has gone way too far. The classic martini is that rare gender-neutral cocktail—something both men and women can drink, looking elegant but not effeminate drinking it. It is the ne plus ultra of urbanity, more cosmopolitan than a cosmopolitan. These fruity-tooty drinky-winkies that they’re pawning off as martinis are heresy, pure and simple.

Anyway, you go someplace darkly atmospheric, you expect it to be populated by intriguing, darkly fascinating urbanites, not loud-mouthed apes in Tedy Bruschi jerseys (not that I have anything against them or Tedy Bruschi, in their proper contexts) with their dolled-up girlfriends, many of whom looked for all the world to be transvestites (nor do I have anything against dolled-up girlfriends or transvestites, again in their proper place).

But, anyway, what’s up with that? I mean, the tranny chic? Maybe it’s that young women of a certain caste don’t usually dress in women’s clothing anymore, so that they’ve forgotten how? The caked-on make-up and teased-out hair was totally Madonna circa “Like a Virgin.” I lived through that once. Let’s not go there again. It’s not funny. I can handle the seventies again, but not the eighties. If you’re too young to remember them, then you have no right going there and traumatizing those of us who do.

I know all of this sounds a little snooty on my part, and really I’m the last person who’s gonna rain on people’s parade. I’m all for a good time. It’s just that the setting and the crowd were annoyingly incongruous. And that made the place seem pretentious, like it was trying to be something it wasn’t. But maybe that’s just Boston.