Not My Hero; But I Did Laugh

When I began this post last night, I wrote: “Over 45,000 people ‘like’ Steven Slater on Facebook.” As of 7:45 this morning, that number is over 100,000 fans. In case you live in a vacuum, Steven Slater is the JetBlue flight attendant who quit his job Monday—and quite dramatically, at that. After an unpleasant encounter with a passenger, Slater opened an aircraft door, inflated the emergency evacuation slide, grabbed a beer, and exited down the slide. My first reaction when I heard about it on the radio was: “Well, he did what every one of us would have liked to do at one time or another in our careers as flight attendants.

I’m going out on a wing here and betting that a majority of those 100,000 fans are flight attendants, past or present. And while most flight attendants may have fantasized about popping a slide, grabbing a beer, and blowing the big aluminum tube, thankfully, we are, for the most part, a stable group of people.

“Move ‘em on, hit ‘em up, Rawhide.” Tiomkin and Washington

Last week I was in Detroit and trying to catch a flight back to Dallas/Ft. Worth. After about an hour’s drive in morning rush-hour traffic, my brother dropped me off at the airport on the departure level, and I entered the terminal building. It was a mob scene inside. There were people lined up for the automated check-in machines and dozens of people working their way like a conga line through stanchions and velvet ropes to speak to a live ticket agent.

Then it was off to the security line. Nearly 50 people were in line ahead of me and there were only two x-ray machines with working crews. For the next half-hour we did “clutch and go’s:” pick up, push, or drag your bag…inch ahead a little…move bag…move feet…move bag…move feet. You get the picture, right? All the while a morbidly obese, uniformed TSA agent was weaving back and forth in front of the crowd, shouting orders about security procedures. It was dehumanizing and nerve wracking.

Sardines in a tin.

My flight to DFW was on an MD-80 airplane with the five across, two-seat/three-seat configuration. The overhead bins were jam-packed full, and as we used to say, there was a butt in every seat and a face in every window. Does any of this sound glamorous, exciting, or even remotely pleasant? No. So, imagine being locked in an aluminum tube for a few hours with 140 paying customers who have just been treated like cattle and feel as defensive as I did.

Something happens to some people when they are cooped up in an airplane, surrounded by strangers. Their language may become shockingly vulgar, they may become physically abusive, and they often reject any kind of authority—especially from a woman or a gay man. Most flight attendants accept that the stress of getting to the airport, getting through security, and being stuffed into a crowded airplane in combination with delays, service cutbacks, and too much alcohol many times, triggers the bad behavior. But believe me, there have always been people who behave badly on a plane—long before 9/11 and today’s challenges.

It’s not only on airplanes that people behave badly. A policeman I know once had a woman deliberately drive her car into him when he gave her a traffic direction she didn’t want to follow. He said she was lucky he didn’t shoot her. Flight attendants don’t have weapons, except for their wits and their training. Since 9/11, they have not been able to rely on the pilots to come out of the cockpit and help if things get out of control in the cabin. On the other hand, since 9/11, more and more passengers are more than willing to jump into a fray and help defuse a bad situation.

Flight Attendants don’t make the rules, but they’re dying to.

Most altercations between passengers and crews on the airplane happen because of a “rules violation,” and flight attendants can seem like “rules Nazi’s” at times. Turning off cell phones, stowing luggage, fastening seatbelts, staying in seats, and smoking in lavatories, are a few of the issues that make problems for cabin crews. It is said the rules of aviation are written in blood, and all of the rules about these issues have been written in someone’s blood. If you think that sounds a little overstated, I assure you it’s not. Aircraft accident investigations have revealed that these seemingly small issues have caused loss of life.

I’m not a fan of Steven Slater and his behavior. I like to think that I held it together pretty well for forty years, with some minor exceptions. I’ve been shoved, verbally abused, and insulted by the very customers whose lives I was expected to save in an emergency. I’ve been permanently injured doing my job. And yes, I have fantasized about opening a door, inflating the slide, and zipping off the job, but I’m one to worry about consequences. Our real heroes are the flight attendants of US Airways Flight 1549 and others whose professionalism and bravery saved the lives of their passengers and coworkers. What Steven did was irresponsible, but give us this moment to relish in our umm. . . .folk hero?

Donna

Road Trip Interrupted

It's Sunday afternoon and I've been busy at the aviation museum in Fort Worth and not writing a new post. I'm behind on everything else I do at home also--the laundry, the housekeeping, the grocery shopping, and the de-cluttering. The mail is piled up on the countertop and the Sunday paper is still spread over the coffee table.

Fortunately, my friend Melissa, (a fifth generation Texan and niece of Davy Crockett), sent this video link that she thought we'd enjoy. It's a great slide show set to the Gary P. Nunn song: What I Like About Texas. Yes it's a country-western song, but smooth jazz or hip hop just wouldn't work as well. It highlights some of the legends and icons, old and current, of the state, and will have to be my "Road Trip" for now.



Shameless Self-Promoting.

I will get back on the road, but at present I'm working at setting up a gift shop in the Fort Worth Veterans Memorial Air Park museum. Our doors will open to the public on July 18th, so please come by if you're in the area. We're located on the north side of the city, not far from the historic Stockyards district.

The address is 3300 Ross Avenue, about two blocks west of Main Street, at the south end of Meacham Airport.

Donna

PS: We're right down the street from the famous Joe T. Garcia's Mexican restaurant!

What am I doing next? Eating! Last week I was looking for things to put in my salad—things that don’t cause heartburn, that is. Tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions make a perfect summer salad for most, but not for me anymore. Additionally, making salads is my least favorite part of meal prep, so something quick and easy was my second priority.

My local Tom Thumb supermarket had watermelon on special, (it is summer after all), so I started with that. I found packages of ready-to-eat red and romaine lettuce leaves and baby spinach. I picked up a couple of navel oranges and some ranch-style seasoned, sliced almonds and headed for the salad dressing aisle. There it was; the salad dressing of my dreams: Briannas Blush Wine Vinaigrette—tall and slender, and kissed with a summer glow. I'm referring to the bottle, of course. A perfectly ripened avocado waited at home in my refrigerator, and there’s always a container of strawberries in there because I make a fruit smoothie every morning for my breakfast.

It might sound like a strange combination of things, but you’ve got to try it to see how good it is.

Here are the ingredients:

Mixed greens (baby spinach, red or bronze lettuce, romaine lettuce, or your favorite).

Strawberries, orange sections, watermelon, avocado in equal portions. Make sure the watermelon and orange sections are not drippy. Pat dry if necessary.

Ranch-style seasoned, sliced almonds.

Briannas Blush Wine Vinaigrette Dressing. Don’t overdo it. There’s a lot of moisture in the fruit.

You can probably use cantaloupe instead of watermelon and substitute or add any berry you like. I’m thinking about trying blueberries also. Add sliced red onions or parmigiano-reggiano shavings if you like. Just make sure you use the Briannas salad dressing mentioned above. Yes, you can make your own blush wine vinaigrette, but I was going for easy as well as delicious.

And no, I promise I'm not on Briannas payroll. I just want to share this wonderful, possibly healthy salad recipe. Let me know if you try it and what you think.

Donna

On the Road: The Hen Party

When last I wrote, we had just left Centerville, Texas, at around 3:30 in the afternoon on Saturday, June 5th, heading for Austin. We said our goodbyes to the Mercedes Benz gang, put on our baseball caps and rumbled out of the parking lot, convertible top down, (you gotta try to look cool), and the air-conditioner on (gotta try to get cool). Jim was falling asleep at the wheel in the hot sun, so we stopped, put up the top, and traded places. I managed to get behind every dawdling farmer or rancher with a pickup truck for the next hundred miles, turning a two-hour drive into three.

On Sunday, Robert and his girlfriend, Sarah, drove with us to Dripping Springs, a town about 25 miles southwest of Austin. That area of Texas Hill Country is home to several wineries, and we were headed to the Driftwood Winery tasting room. I had read that the owner, Gary Elliott, had been hired to fly for Continental Airlines some years back, and Jim was hoping to talk with him. He found Mr. Elliott hard at work installing a fan in his new pavilion. According to Elliott: “If you’re thinking of throwing everything away to go into the wine business—don’t.”

After sampling half-a-dozen wines in the tasting room, we each bought a glass of our favorite and then wandered out to a ledge overlooking the vineyards and a field of sheep grazing far below. There we found tables and chairs scattered under the trees where we could sit in the shade for a while, sip our wines, and enjoy the pastoral view.

The Anniversary Party.

Next it was a dash back to Austin so I could check off Number Four on the Texas Monthly "Bucket List: Play Chicken Shit Bingo at Ginny's Little Longhorn Saloon." Ginny’s was NOT one of those trendy, downtown Austin Sixth Street destinations. It wasn’t even downtown. The building looked rather like a little old country church plopped down in the middle of an industrial strip of Burnet Road on Austin’s north side.

Just inside the door was an empty chicken-wire cage sitting on a platform; the floor of the coop was covered in numbered squares. The place was packed. At the front of the bar a band played loud country western music, and judging by the bobbing heads a couple feet from the band, it appeared that people were dancing. Jim estimated that there were easily 200 people inside the tiny bar. We ordered some Lone Stars and huddled at the back of the place, a few feet from the cage.

The Texas Monthly “Bucket List” article had suggested that the place gets busy, so get there early to play bingo. Who knew that Sunday, June 6, 2010 was the 10-year anniversary of the Chicken Shit Bingo tradition?

How They “Doo” It.

When it’s time to start, everyone who wants to play lines up, pays $2.00, and gets a ticket with one of the numbers that’s printed on the floor of the chicken coop. Sissy, the hen, is delivered to the coop and fed a combination of chicken feed and dried bread. When Sissy stops and drops on a square, the ticket holder with that number wins the $114 purse. Because it was the 10th anniversary, the purse was doubled—and so was the crowd.

The Honky-Tonk Sauna.

The band welcomed everyone to their little “honky-tonk sauna” and announced the game would start at five o’clock. The place was stifling hot, there was hardly any room to move, and people were still coming in. At last we were told to line up if we wanted to play bingo, and a chicken appeared in the coop. There were so many people by then that I didn’t even see the owner arrive with the hen just a few feet away from us. Robert got in line for me, and I sat down in a suddenly empty chair next to a pretty blonde lady at a nearby table. I told her about my blog and that I was working my way through the bucket list from Texas Monthly.

“Oh,” she shouted over the noisy crowd. “You’re working on a bucket list?”

“Yes,” I shouted back. A few moments later, Robert returned with my two dollars.

“The tickets are all sold out,” he said, handing me my money. “Sorry, Mom!”

People are good.

The blond lady’s husband returned to the table with their two tickets, waving them proudly, and I gave him back his chair. A moment later, she was holding her tickets up before me shouting, “Pick one!” When I questioned why, she repeated that I should pick one and her husband agreed. I rationalized that I couldn’t check off number four on the bucket list if I didn’t play, so I said thanks and picked the ticket with number thirty-one on it. People were gathered around the coop, yelling and cheering, and cameras were flashing. Sissy, the hen, was on the move.

The couple was so nice to me. They made sure I could see the chicken and told me where she was strutting and what number she was pausing over. They even offered me one of their chairs. Suddenly it occurred to me: “They think I’m dying! They think I’m working on my own bucket list.” I kept wondering what would happen if number thirty-one was the winner.

When the hen finally dropped the doody, (on someone else’s number), I asked the nice couple if I could keep the ticket.

“Of course!” they both answered. About then they ordered another round of beers and I pressed a twenty into the woman’s hand.

“This is for your beers; enjoy!” I said. I thanked them for their kindness, and Robert, Sarah, Jim and I hurried back out into the sunlight and headed off for dinner.

Faith in our fellow humans can be confirmed in the most unusual places!

Donna