What is it with Bostonians and public assemblies these days? First we had the Pizza Tosser. Then the Pops Balcony Brawlers. Now we have the West Roxbury Community Center Fightin' Moms.

Every May, the community center puts on a musical in which all the actors are kids. Director Bill Jacob does a great job, the kids all seem to love him (in part because he treats them like adults), the acting is actually very good and each year they sell more tickets. And therein lies the rub: Tickets are general admission; kids in the cast, who get to the West Roxbury High School auditorium two hours before the performance, rush to mark seats as "reserved." It's like a vast game of musical chairs (made worse by the fact that some kids mark off more seats than they actually need).

On Friday night, "Fiddler on the Roof" opened (for its two-day run). A mother and her kid dared to sit in some huge block of seats that somebody else had "reserved." The mother of the kid who reserved like three rows of seats asked her to move; after all, her kid was in the show. Wrong argument to make to another mother with a kid in the show. They got face to face. The argument escalated: voices got louder, people started watching. I admit it - sitting maybe three feet from the mothers, I was braced for a slap or two, a mini-Pops smackdown. But no: Stalemate. The lone mother sat back down with a glower.

Ah, but she was soon surrounded by the enemy - an entire brood of people harummphing and whispering and pointing and tch-ing. It was verbal water torture. After 10 minutes, but before the show started, she couldn't take it anymore, and she and her non-acting kid left for seats elsewhere (probably way up in the balcony since by then, all the seats were marked as "reserved").

Today, two days later, people were still talking about it (another cast-member mom saw Nancy today, offered some pleasantries, then asked "Can you believe Friday night?").