Understudies Get A’s From Flying Critic

I am not a gleeful crosser of picket lines, nor am I a dedicated pro-unionist. As a theater reviewer, I’ve witnessed great work done in either camp--union and non-union houses--so call me an agnostic on the subject.

When we boarded TWA’s flight 853 an hour late Saturday at Boston’s Logan Airport, it was with considerable sympathy for the striking flight attendants who faced a 22% cut in salary and were fighting to concede only 18% of their paychecks. It seemed reasonable, at least from an uninvolved bystander’s point of view. Simple arithmetic told me just what a similar slice would do to my own take-home pay.

In addition, of course, we had wondered how the flight would go--if it went at all--and had prepared against possible odds. In a yellow canvas bag, my husband and I had stashed Algerian couscous, Egyptian potato salad and fruit, just in case. Would the show go on, even without key actors?

The show went on. Aside from the initial hour’s delay, the journey was smooth, which was the first surprise. The second concerned the “understudies”: the men and women who materialized as our improvised hosts of the air--all clearly past their mid-life crises and some openly silver-haired. Mature, yes, but hardly superannuated.

At first, it was merely unusual to see these potential members of the local senior citizen bingo club telling the diehards where to stash the oversized bags that are always an inch too thick to squeeze under the seats. When the time came for takeoff and its obligatory recitative of instructions on what to do in an emergency, it was hardly routine.

Big Al (a white-topped, robust, six-footer) and Annemarie (small-boned, svelte and gray-haired) went through the opening motions tentatively, checking each other out as they struggled (almost imperceptibly) with the effort to remember their lines. This may sound silly, but the hesitation vivified something we had long ago stopped paying attention to because it had become such a mindless act--a chore rather than a task.

And that was only the beginning.

It soon became clear that everything this Silver Circle did was, at the very least, stamped with freshness. They poured you a drink with total engagement. They helped you choose a magazine as if your life depended on it. How committed can anyone be to fixing yet another Scotch and soda? Committed. Even the meals-on-wheels routine up and down the aisles was humanized. Each tray arrived from the galley in somebody’s hand. The strike may have imposed an austerity menu (cold cuts, a salad and a gingerbread square), but this classy group of grandparents saw that it was served in style.

OK, so I wasn’t born yesterday. A lot of the TLC that these mannerly elders were lavishing on us came from the sheer novelty and nostalgia (for them) of the occasion. As a little postprandial conversation revealed, they were members of an organization of retired flight attendants called Clipped Wings. All had served food and drink in the skies before, but it had been a while--in some cases as long as 20 years. Who can deny the thrill of being asked back to do a job one had loved doing once? Perhaps a job one had not wanted to stop doing?

They scoured the aisles for misplaced trash and scrutinized our souls for secret yearnings. They found pillows and blankets for the sleepy, ducked to avoid hindering sightlines during the movie. The courtesies may have been common but were uncommonly performed. Not since childhood had anyone placed a blanket on me as I slept quite as gently as big Al did. He also roused my sleeping husband with a slight tap on the shoulder and the reassuring whisper: “Buddy, we’re almost there.”

Whatever the reasons for these exceptional performances, they were, in the end, performances, true to the best rules of theater--and the best rules of life.

You don’t phone it in, you feel it, you believe it, you play it to the hilt. How dramatically they illustrated that if there are good ways and better ways of doing things-- any things--the key lies there: in the right kind of energy expended.

Waiting on the public in the air is no different from waiting on people on the ground. It may not seem like much, but it’s what you bring to it. Like the waitress in the musical “Working,” you have to love what you do--and you have to care.

The caring we witnessed was far more than skin deep. A simple gesture became an important contribution, if only for a moment. But theater, too, is ephemeral. That’s its specialty. Everything we pay lip service to in our overhyped society was delivered here, in earnest. Inadvertently, our retired attendants had not so much redefined as truly defined professionalism--or was it amateurism? “To do with love.”