Ordinarily, this kind of news might not merit a full post. But after another excruciating bus ride into New York City with some clod who had to broadcast every detail of his business over his cell phone, I find what the Alexandrinsky Theater has done worthy of applause.

The Alexandrinsky, located in St. Petersburg, is Russia's oldest theater. I think this is where I saw a production of Lucia di Lamermoor (Italian opera, but sung in Russian) on my trip to the city in 1982, but I no longer have the playbill. What makes it worthy of great praise now is that it has just installed equipment to jam cell phone signals so that theatergoers will now hear nothing but the actors on stage. And according to a British newspaper, a second theater in "Petya" (the Russian nickname for St. Petersburg) later followed suit.

Once you have made your first adoption trip to Russia, you will understand how significant this is.

Russians came out of the economic deep freeze imposed by Communism with a deep thirst for the latest in Western gadgetry. With land-line phones in chaos, cell phones quickly rose to the top of the must-have list, and I have watched more than a few Russians juggle more than one ringing phone at a time. Cell phones have become so critical that, on one stretch of highway in Sakhalin, signs were posted by the roadto notify drivers that they were entering an area where mountains made reception difficult.

The constant presence of a cell phone is not always a bad thing. You will find, during your adoption journeys, that your agency rep will be chasing down a lot of paperwork and people, and having a cell phone means that no one will ever not be able to find you. And cell phones have proven life-saving to Russians, too: Police learned that Chechen terrorists had seized a Moscow theater in 2002 because theatergoers called a radio station on their cell phones.

Don't, however, look for jamming in theaters or on buses in the U.S. any time soon though. Desirable though it might be, it is apparently illegal.