A few years ago the only tickets I could get to the Blue Jays’ season opener were in section 142, i.e., The Family Zone, where no alcohol is allowed. It was awful. My baseball fanhood, while enduring, does not blind me to the fact that a night at the ballpark is improved greatly by a plastic cup of watery suds. But I saw the point. I’ve sat in enough other sections of the Rogers Centre, surrounded by enough listing, sputtering, suds-besotted yokels to know that’s where I’d sit if I had kids.

So I’m coming out in favour of segregation. The Skydome used to do it with smokers, when you could still smoke indoors and I still smoked, sending us to a stark, concrete, former storeroom beneath the depths of the outfield stands. BMO Field does it with the TFC’s supporter groups, assigning them to different sections of the stands. When people’s (perfectly permissible) behaviour starts interfering with everyone else’s enjoyment of the event, they should get their own section.

Never have I felt this more strongly than last night at the Sony Centre. It may surprise the couple seated directly behind me, but I did not pay $85 to hear them drown out Elvis Costello with their out-of-tune, wrong-lyrics version of “Alison”. I don’t object to shouts of “Pump it up!” during its chorus, but the full-length accompaniment to “I Want You” was simply out of bounds.

So I say stick ‘em all in their own section. Let them act like they’re five-year-olds at a Wiggles show and sing their little hearts out. Heck, make it a good section. I’m sure the band would appreciate their enthusiasm in ways that I don’t. They can act out the words to “Mystery Dance”. They can drum on the backs of each others’ seats. They can show off the moves they learned from Blue Peter videos. And they can stay the hell away from me.

Ideas Free to a Good Home is a clearinghouse of ideas we’re too lazy to develop ourselves.