DREAMS REALLY DO come true, I thought to myself after a male flight attendant walked on board and announced that the agent had told him Brad Pitt would be on our flight. (This was pre-Angelina.) I snuck into the lav to fluff my hair and refresh my makeup, just in case we made eye contact, not that I actually thought it would go anywhere from there. Then again, I had met a flight attendant who went on a date with Billy Idol and another who went out with Rod Stewart after becoming acquainted in flight. When I came out of the bathroom I noticed I wasn’t alone, as all the other flight attendants looked ten times better than they did five minutes ago. The flight attendant who had made the exciting announcement now sat in a first-class seat cracking up and pointing at us, “Oh my God, look at you guys! I can’t believe you fell for it!”
I wish I had fallen for it on another flight. During boarding I handed a grungy-looking guy in first class a glass of water. “Are you in a band?” I asked. There was no other way to explain the homeless attire. Turns out he was in a rock band, but not just any band: he was in my favorite band!
I looked at him funny. I’d never seen this guy before. “You must be new to the band.”
“I’m the lead singer.”
What he was, was a liar! Because the lead singer of the band I loved was hot. This guy with his scarecrow arms was not. At five-feet-seven I towered over the man. On television the lead singer looked tall and buff, always taking the stage shirtless, showing off a sexy six-pack. I highly doubted this guy on the plane had a two-pack under his thin hole-y T-shirt.
Back in the galley I decided to check the paperwork for his name. In a way I wish I hadn’t. Because there it was, his name, printed on the thin paper that had been clipped to a compartment door housing all our glassware. I couldn’t believe that was him! My rock ’n’ roll fantasy.
Before I became a flight attendant, I didn’t actually believe that dreams came true. Growing up in Dallas, a pretty big city with plenty of opportunities for a girl like me, never inspired me to think I could do anything extraordinary with my life. But once I moved to New York all that changed. I was living in one of the most exciting cities in the world and seeing things with my very own eyes that before only existed on television. Places like the Plaza Hotel, Central Park, the Empire State Building, Wall Street, Chinatown, Little Italy, which had always just seemed like movie backdrops. The world was at my fingertips and I had no idea what to do with it. I couldn’t believe this was my life.
The celebrities were just the beginning of this realization. They were sitting in the same seat I had just sat in to eat the peanut butter and jelly sandwich I’d brought from home while waiting for the flight to board. My regular butt had touched the same fabric as many celebrity butts. I’ll never forget the time I was deadheading on a flight home and the first-class flight attendant told me one of my favorite actresses had sat in my very seat after she won the Oscar last night. For whatever reason, that’s the moment I believed I really could do anything with my life. Like, for example, become a photographer. So when I found out what the cute guy in the last row of business did for a living, I no longer wanted to date him. I wanted to work for him!
The guy was a well-known photographer, and there was clearly more to be had here than a night out on a town. On a whim, I offered to work for him for free for one day just so I could see what his life was really like, and surprisingly he agreed. This would have never happened to me working a regular job on the ground! Spending the day at his SoHo studio was one of the most exciting days of my life. All I did was water plants on his rooftop deck, order lunch for a group of grungy people I’m pretty sure were in a band, and file some papers, but the point is, I was there—me! Living a life so unattainable that I hadn’t even bothered to dream about the possibility.
Just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, we jumped on his motorcycle and took to the streets of Manhattan. He wanted to pick something up at his other studio. With my arms wrapped around him, we swerved in and out of traffic. With the wind whipping through my hair, I leaned back and looked up, taking in the magnificent buildings above. Along the way we stopped to give the grunge band’s leftover gourmet lunch to a homeless lady the photographer knew by name. The experience was surreal. The best part may even be that I never heard from the photographer again. Sometimes it’s best to leave a good thing alone. That day I had the time of my life, and I got to experience something I’ll never forget. And if there’s one thing flight attendants have it’s a ton of these amazing moments.
My roommate Grace had her moment of a lifetime when Howard Stern called the house. Grace had an obsession with Howard that only got worse after she had him on a flight. Each morning she’d attempt to call his radio show, tying up the house phone for hours listening to a busy tone only to dial again. Then one day she finally got through and told him about the time she had him on a flight. They went on to dish about celebrities on the airplane. Grace wouldn’t tell Howard her name, so he dubbed her “Loose-Lipped Meg,” and soon there was an airplane buzzing in the background.
The following morning, the phone rang and when I picked up I heard the airplane buzz and then a very familiar voice asked if Loose-Lipped Meg was home. I told Howard to hold on and ran upstairs to wake up Grace. “Oh my God, it’s Howard!”
“Who?” she asked, all groggy.
“Howard Stern!”
She bolted out of bed, ran to the phone, and after a quick introduction to his listeners, Howard asked, “So did you see the New York Times this morning?”
“No. Why?” squeaked Grace who must have known deep down in her heart this couldn’t be good.
“They contacted Oprah. She’s denying the story you told us about her yesterday.”
“What!” Grace shrieked. Howard Stern. The New York Times. Oprah! Loose-Lipped Meg almost hit the linoleum kitchen floor. Yesterday she was just a lowly new hire and today she was the subject of a story running in the New York Times. Millions of people now knew who she was. Including Oprah. Who kinda-sorta was calling her a liar! This was bad, really bad.
Grace herself had not witnessed the incident (nor did I or anyone I know personally). But it was a pretty well-circulated rumor in flight attendant circles. The story is that Oprah boarded a flight and asked for an all-female cockpit crew, and then upon seeing an African-American flight attendant, asked to be served by her. The New York Times reporter felt Grace might be telling the truth since she had mentioned having Howard on board and discussed the conversation they had had. What sealed the deal for the reporter was when Howard Stern guessed the airline Loose-Lipped Meg worked for, the airline Meg denied working for with a nervous giggle, which was now printed in the New York Times—airline name, giggle, and all. Oprah’s people called the story ridiculous.
“What year did this happen?” asked Howard.
“Oh… umm… I’m not sure. 1995?”
“She could be telling the truth,” his news anchor, Robin, chimed in. “Oprah’s people stated she quit flying commercial in 1995.”
Grace’s world shrank that day. Luckily, she never did get in trouble for dishing the dirt on America’s favorite daytime talk show host, but she did learn a very important lesson: keep your mouth shut. Flight attendants aren’t allowed to talk about celebrities.
On the other hand, if we don’t mention them by name, we’re not really talking about them, right? So here’s the galley gossip. He was one of the biggest pop stars of our time, and while he wouldn’t breathe the air at 35,000 feet without wearing a face mask, he had no problem scarfing down two first-class meals. She has an A-list celebrity daughter and she once did three sets of sit-ups on the floor in the first row of first class. This actor known for having a thing for supermodels fell asleep with his hand down his pants in first class. A member of one of the most successful boy bands of the 1990s refused to buckle his belt while taxiing to the runway until the flight attendant threatened to have him removed from the flight. The comedian who got kicked off one of daytime TV’s hottest talk shows asked the pilot not to make any more announcements in flight because her baby was sleeping. A beautiful A-list actress bit her toenails in business class. This same actress had once been married to the actor who cut his omelet into bite-size pieces with a knife and fork and then proceeded to eat it with his hands. Let’s not forget the soulful singer who ordered the flight attendant not to talk to “her man” when all the flight attendant wanted to know was what he would like to drink. This long-haired singer of one of the most popular rock bands of the 1990s was way too old to be flirting with the captain’s sixteen-year-old daughter, who was non-reving in first class. Two has-been R&B singers who are now divorced once exited the lavatory together looking extremely disheveled. Known as the sexiest woman in the world, she’s also one of the nicest and most generous women in the world and tipped a gate agent $50 for letting her borrow a cell phone. The greatest R&B singer who ever lived was so afraid of flying he would only sit in the first row of first class. If that wasn’t available he’d go on standby for another flight. This talk show icon left such a mess in first class that both passengers and flight attendants were shocked. A solo artist who once belonged to one of the most famous girl groups in the world lectured a flight attendant on the importance of being nice to his mother. A rapper who has changed his name several times over the years got caught checking out the flight attendant’s you-know-what as she walked down the aisle. This young star sat in coach even though his movie was number one at the box office. A Canadian who shot to the top of the music charts with her scathing lyrics wouldn’t allow a passenger in the window seat to pass by her in order to use the lavatory until quietly meditating with her first.
Once I had a cabin full of Victoria’s Secret models and had no idea they were on my flight until one of my coworkers asked me how they were. Except for the fact that they ate lettuce without dressing and were super skinny and had smiles that practically wrapped around their face, they were just like anyone else traveling in first class on a red-eye flight. Many celebrities book full-fare business-class seats and then upgrade to first class, just like regular old passengers do. They, too, like a bargain. And when they don’t get an upgrade, they freak out just like normal passengers. Although normal passengers don’t often complain about being mobbed in coach when their upgrade doesn’t go through.
On one flight to Los Angeles, my roommate Jane found herself non-reving in first class with an entire cabin full of Hollywood bigwigs. Jennifer Lopez, then a Fly Girl, sat in front of her with her first husband, the waiter, who sat directly across from Harvey Keitel. Harvey kept standing up in front of the cabin and stretching his legs. From time to time he’d stare intently at Jane. “I’m not sure if he was trying to figure out if I was someone important or if he wanted to ask me out!” We quickly came to the conclusion he wanted to ask her out. Between renting movies starring Jane’s future boyfriend, we spent the next week trying to figure out how to contact him. Don’t laugh. These things happen. And we weren’t about to let a moment like this get away. Jane never did score a date with Harvey Keitel, but we sure had fun talking about it. This is why the job is so exciting. The possibilities are limitless. And just when you think you’ve experienced it all, something else wondrously amazing or far-out weird will happen.
Case in point, my mother started flying.
Large companies in any industry often engage in corporate upbeat talk about “being a family,” when in reality they couldn’t be any further from the kind. Then there are the rare corporations like Southwest Airlines that not only treat employees like family but actually employ married couples, parents, children, and even siblings. In 1989, Herb Kelleher, cofounder and CEO of Southwest Airlines, was quoted in Texas Monthly saying, “Some employees have been married to one employee, divorced, and then married to two, maybe three others.” In 2006, Southwest was home to 763 married couples. My airline, on the other hand, traditionally had very strict antinepotism rules, but by the time I entered the flight academy in 1995, all that had changed. Even so, it was a pretty big deal when our instructors found out that a classmate’s father had been a pilot for the same airline for more than twenty years. Two years later, in 1997, it was still a big deal when I pinned my mother’s silver wings to her blue lapel at her graduation ceremony—not just because we were related but because I had the most seniority, which was pretty much unheard of at the time. That year we became one of two mother-daughter duos to be based in New York.
My mother had spent her entire life dreaming about becoming a flight attendant. I remember watching her over a bowl of Froot Loops at the kitchen table filling out applications to all the major carriers—American, Continental, Delta, Pan Am, TWA, United, Southwest—always tossing them out when they were complete. She realized she couldn’t follow through if she had to transfer to another base and leave me and my sister behind. Eventually she gave up the dream and became a hairdresser. But when a few of her clients who happened to be flight attendants found out that my mother had always dreamed of flying, they each brought her an application from their airline. While flattered, my mother insisted that her time had come and gone—after all, she was in her late forties! The flight attendants told her to stop being silly.
Back in the 1960s stewardesses had to follow strict height, weight, and age requirements. According to Wikipedia, they had to be at least five-feet-two and weigh no more than 130 pounds. They also couldn’t be married or have children. On top of that, mandatory retirement age was thirty-two. With that in mind it shouldn’t be a surprise to learn that most stewardesses averaged eighteen months on the job. That’s it.
Today the minimum age requirement to become a flight attendant is between eighteen and twenty-one. There is no maximum age restriction. As long as flight attendants can pass a yearly recurrent training program, and don’t have any health or physical problems that would prevent them from flying, they can continue to work. Height requirements are for safety reasons only. Typically flight attendants range between five feet, three inches, and six feet, one inch. We must be tall enough to reach safety equipment stored overhead and short enough to avoid bumping our heads against the aircraft ceiling. (For this reason on some regional carriers using smaller aircraft equipment, maximum height requirement is five feet, ten inches.) In the 1990s weight requirements for flight attendants were dropped, but weight must be in proportion to height. If flight attendants cannot sit in the jump seat without an extended seat belt or fit through the emergency window exit, they cannot fly. Most foreign carriers still follow strict height, weight, and age requirements.
The benefits of hiring older people who have already had a career is they tend to appreciate what being a flight attendant is all about, and that shows on the job. Younger flight attendants who have never worked a regular 9-to-5 job have no idea how good they have it. Hiring more-experienced people also helps the airlines save money when it comes to paying for benefits and retirement. Once, while I was explaining this to a passenger who couldn’t believe my mother was also a flight attendant, he informed me that he found it unsettling to stare at postmenopausal women pushing beverage carts for three hours. As if buying an airline ticket entitled him to eye candy. Of course, he wasn’t much to look at, either. Another passenger wished the airlines would hire nicer, better-looking flight attendants like Virgin, because the last thing he wanted was to be scolded in flight by someone’s grandmother or gay cousin. What’s amazing is how often passengers complaining about flight attendants being old and ugly are old and ugly themselves.
I don’t know what it is, but whenever it comes to flight attendants, people tend to forget that we have rights regardless of what we do for a living. What I find most unsettling is the number of passengers with ageist and sexist opinions about flight attendants who think it’s okay to not just have these outdated opinions, but to express them to the very group of people they’re talking about! I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but flight attendants are allowed to age and gain weight like the rest of society. One passenger had the nerve to complain about a “fat flight attendant” who ruined his flight because she kept waking him up whenever she passed down the aisle. I wanted to point out that if certain passengers weren’t spilling out into the aisle (cough, cough), “fat” flight attendants wouldn’t be knocking into them. Another passenger whacked me hard on the butt after she accused me of stepping on her toe. For the record, my height and weight are nicely proportional, but even I can’t walk down the aisle in a straight line without swinging my body from side to side because of all the heads, legs and feet hanging out into the aisle.
My mother, like Linda, my old roommate from training, started flying when most people her age begin thinking of retiring. Her life went from turning yet another brunette a beautiful shade of blond with a bowl of bleach and a stack of foils to Vice President Al Gore saying hello to her in passing at JFK Airport outside of security. One day she was repairing another botched-up home cut and the next day a member of the band Air Supply is flirting with her in the first-class galley. On a bus from LaGuardia to Newark she shared family pictures with British reggae vocalist Maxi Priest’s drummer. She was shocked to discover a well-known talk show host had hands that were so shaky she could barely lift her glass of wine. And she couldn’t stop laughing when one of the most famous movie stars from the 1950s told one of her crew members—who had spent the entire flight bending over backward to please the difficult and demanding Hollywood star—“My dog likes you. I don’t know why.”
After a month on the job, my mother said to me, “Whenever you came home and told us about the crazy things that happened to you on the airplane I used to wonder if maybe you were exaggerating a little. Now I know you weren’t.”
With my mother on the line and living in my crash pad, my life went from weird to super weird. One day I walked into the house after a trip and Jane stopped me in the foyer with a nervous look on her face. “I don’t know if I should tell you this or not, because if it were me I don’t think I’d want to know—”
“Spill it!” I demanded, unzipping the back of my dress, eager to get out of my uniform as quickly as possible. After a flight I always smell like a mix of chocolate chip cookies, urine from the lav, and whatever I may have spilled—maybe an exploding bottle of champagne or an entire can of tomato juice. Customs and immigration in Vancouver once told me they could always tell when our flight had arrived because they could smell it as soon as the gate agents opened the aircraft door.
Jane took a deep breath. “Yakov can’t decide who to ask out—you or your mother.” I froze midzip.
It was bad enough that I’d had to pretend to be Yakov’s wife in an emergency code enforcement situation, but to think he actually believed he had a shot was disturbing to say the least. On top of that he couldn’t decide who he liked more, me or the woman who bore me. My mother, of course, claimed to find the situation to be just as sickening as I did, but based on the number of times she relayed the story to family and friends, blushing and giggling each time she recounted it, I think she may have been a little too flattered.
The dispatchers over at Kew Gardens Car Service weren’t making it any easier. Whenever I’d call for a car, they’d ask in a yeah-baby kind of voice, “Is this the mother or the daughter?”
I’d close my eyes tightly, thinking to myself, gross, gross, gross, and then say, “The daughter,” as matter-of-factly as I could. I didn’t want to egg them on. They liked to tease.
Even worse was making the same distinction to a driver—in person! “Really, you can’t tell?” I asked a new guy who refused to meet my glare in the rearview mirror.
Once a driver asked my mother how her date went the other night. At first she had no idea what he was talking about. When it finally dawned on her that he thought she was me, she made the executive decision to play along. “Great,” she said, before closing her eyes and pretending to sleep.
“Why in the world would you do that?!” I cried over the laughter of my roommates.
“It was a long day. I didn’t feel like talking.”
“The next time I get into a cab I’m going to pretend I’m you and ask the driver out!” Then I one-upped it. “I’ll also tell the lesbian doctor down the street that I’d love to grab a drink with her next time I’m in town.”
My mother swore she wouldn’t do it again. Then she added, “Just because the doctor lady asked me if I’d like to get a drink with her doesn’t mean she wants to go on a date!”
Yeah, okay, whatever, Mom.
At work I couldn’t decide which was stranger: Coming face-to-face with award-winners like Robert Redford or Leonardo DiCaprio or working across the aisle from my mother? Making direct eye contact with Goldie Hawn on one of my very first flights to Los Angeles or the time I needed the merlot from the other cart and accidentally yelled out “Mom!” in the middle of the business-class aisle?
“Don’t call me ‘Mom’!” my mother would demand before each flight we were scheduled to work together, as if I had actually wanted to cause a spectacle in flight. The reason my mother—I mean Ellen—didn’t want me to call her ‘Mom’ had nothing to do with being professional and had everything to do with not looking “old.” Ellen looked great for her age and the last thing she wanted was a planeful of passengers knowing she had such “an old child”—her words, not mine.
Although we only worked with each other a handful of times, Ellen was always quick to spill the beans. I could always tell whenever she’d shared our little secret because people would start looking at me with wide eyes and silly grins, their necks elongated to get a better view of the freak walking down the aisle. Whenever I’d confront her, she’d laugh it off and say, “Oh, it’s just one person,” only it was never just one person. One person would tell another person and so on and so on and so on.
“I can tell you told the guy in the last row,” I said, giving my mother the evil eye.
“What was I supposed to do? He kept asking me to fix him up with the pretty flight attendant named Heather. I told him I’d put in a good word for him, but he wouldn’t let it go. He’s driving me crazy! And I was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable about it all. I thought it best he should know.”
Not me. That’s why my dates never found out the truth about Ellen whenever they’d stop by the crash pad to pick me up. To them she was my older roommate from Texas. There was no need to tell them her husband was also my father. Imagine running into a fetishist harboring both flight attendant and mother-daughter fantasies. Combine the two and you’ve got a serious pervert on your hands. Love was hard enough to find without worrying about that kind of stuff.
But for me, maybe the strangest thing of all was that on the airplane our roles switched and I became the overprotective one. When Ellen accidentally spilled a little water on a passenger’s armrest, and the guy made a face like “What the hell is wrong with you?” I practically flew across the cabin.
I am not a confrontational person. But no one was going to treat my mother like that! It didn’t matter how many frequent-flier miles the guy had or if he’d been an executive on the board of directors, I wasn’t having it. Of course, I would have never reacted the same way if I’d been the one he had yelled at. I would have apologized over and over and then gone into the galley to curse him out with my coworkers. But this was my mother. It was different.
Ellen pushed me aside and whispered, “I can handle this!”
Of course she could. I didn’t doubt it for a second. But I stood right there to make sure the guy didn’t say anything disrespectful. Because that’s my mama, dude!
Besides being overprotective, I wasn’t always as patient with Ellen as I would have been with another coworker, and this always confused passengers who were unaware of the Grey Gardens situation happening on the airplane.
“Just pull on it!” I once demanded when my mother couldn’t open one of the stuck business-class closets, before walking away to hand out mints in the cabin.
“That wasn’t very nice,” said a passenger waiting in line nearby for the lavatory.
“I don’t like her very much,” Ellen playfully growled. When the passenger looked concerned, my mother fessed up, “I can say things like that. She’s my daughter.”
Of course the look of concern immediately turned into one of freakish wonder.
Passengers weren’t the only ones reacting oddly. We once had a captain make a silly announcement about it right after takeoff, and a ticket agent, who put two and two together when she noticed we looked a lot alike and had the same last name, made an announcement in the airport terminal. I’ll never forget opening the jet bridge door and hearing over the PA: “Ladies and gentleman, I have some exciting news to share with you. Today on your flight…” No, no, no—she wouldn’t! I thought to myself, but she did. She informed everyone in the gate area that a mother-daughter flight attendant team would be serving them on board their flight today. The response can only be compared to that of telling a bunch of kids that Mickey Mouse and Goofy will be on board handing out snacks. Don’t get me wrong, working next to me in uniform made my mother proud. (And there were some perks, like the fact that I could always count on her to take a trip for me if I had a hot date.) But listening to the applause in the terminal that day, I wanted to bolt. It’s just not cool to live and work with your mom!
What is cool is spotting someone you’ve had a crush on for a very long time on the airplane. For my mother that person was Keanu Reeves. She’d been in love with the movie star since he’d starred in the movie Something’s Gotta Give as Diane Keaton’s much younger doctor boyfriend. Imagine her surprise when he sat down across the aisle from her in business class on a six-hour flight she had been scheduled to deadhead on. She never spoke to him. She couldn’t even look at him. But if she had wanted to she could have reached across the aisle and touched him. “Okay, I can retire now,” she said after the flight.
My Keanu Reeves moment happened when I spotted the CEO at the watch company I used to work for, walking through the airport at LaGuardia. I had just gotten off a flight and made a beeline straight for him.
“Hi! Remember me? I used to work for you!” I said excitedly. I’d been waiting for this day for three years. He looked nervous. “I’m Heather Poole.”
I could tell he had no idea who I was, and he confirmed this when he said, “I… uh… have to catch a flight.”
“Okay, well, here’s my number,” I said, scribbling it on the back of a passenger’s business card. “Maybe after you have a chance to relax you’ll remember me.”
Or maybe not. He never called. So I took matters into my own hands and called him. Being a flight attendant had given me confidence. I’d grown so accustomed to dealing with “important” people, or at least those who thought they were important, so I could handle myself in pretty much any situation, including dating the old boss. Anyway, I had nothing to lose.
I left the CEO a message, telling him I’d show him around New York City next time he came to town, even though he probably knew the city better than I did since his company had a showroom here. One year later, he returned my call. There was never any intimacy other than a little hand-holding and a kiss at the end of the night. But there were black town cars and first-row tickets to Broadway shows, nice dinners at the best restaurants, and plenty of good conversation that revolved mostly around where I’d been, where I was going next, and all the people I’d met in between. Basically I did the majority of the talking, which was fine by me because I like to talk. When he’d leave I wouldn’t hear from him again for weeks, even months until he’d board a flight to New York, pull out his BlackBerry while sitting in first class waiting for the plane to depart and type, “What are you doing tonight?” Four hours later a black car would pick me up and whisk me into the city. He was a successful businessman who was fifteen years older than me, so we didn’t have a lot in common, but what we did share was enough. We were living the dream. We were two lonely people who traveled.